Hello I'm Dr Kevin Rains from Niche Environment and Heritage, and welcome to National Science
Week, and this is a bengal chutney bottle one of many glass finds that have been found as part of
our work. There's two main sites that we've looked at. The Woolloongabba site which was an early
water reserve and quarry and local garbage dump, and then the South Brisbane railway yards.
We found quite a number of bottles, both broken and intact, as well as an early drain. But also
the Albert Street station in the city. It used to be called Old Frogs Hollow
or Lower Albert Street, as well as the first chinatown, and here we are digging up that site
a series of hand exchange pits as well as machine excavator pits, and we found a number
of finds including porphyry foundations of a possible kitchen, as well as a garbage deposit
this is part of an early hotel site. Now here's what we normally find are our artefacts all
jumbled up with an archaeological context. So these are materials of a mixture of glass,
ceramic, and also bone and shells. Now what is the process that we go through when we are
excavating these materials. So each find is given a unique field specimen number for example FS001,
so we tend to bag everything in certain classes so we try to bag all the glass together,
all the metal together, the shell, and so forth. Now we also then take it to the lab and it goes
through a series of processing of the finds. So the artefacts are cleaned, usually just with some
clean water, we don't try to use too much in the way of detergents that might damage the materials.
Also the detergents may remove important residues from what the artefacts were used for, for future
research. Then they are sorted into their groups based on colour and special types. Now with glass
that can be very very difficult because glass comes in a lot of different colours, which is
very subjective. It depends on the light. Depends on the age of the of the the bottle or the glass.
Also the glass actually changes colour over time. Also the colour can vary within the glass bottle
from the top to the bottom, and the thicker parts will be darker and the top section will
be lighter, and when you have lots of fragments you're not really sure if this represents the
one bottle or numerous bottles. We rarely find whole bottles like this in archaeological context
usually they're all broken up into a lot of really really sharp pieces, so we have to put in place a
number of safety measures both during excavation, but also the cleaning as well. During the cleaning
and sorting phase. Everything tries to be given a use if we know what it looks like and what it
was. Like this chutney bottle would be singled out and given a name and a description of what it is,
a date if we can find out what the date is from the style and the technology going behind used
to manufacture this, and sometimes there will also be a manufacturer name on the actual bottle,
which is always useful. But many many don't actually have manufacturers names or any of
those sorts of bits of information. Then they are individually photographed, they're catalogued,
and then bagged or boxed and placed into storage for future research. All of the materials from
the Cross River Rail archaeological program have actually gone to the Queensland Museum
and there they'll be stored in perpetuity for the public and for researchers to look at, and
so far we've already had a number of PHD students and honours students who've actually been looking
at this material. So it's really really worth the effort and the expense of getting
these out of the ground. I hope you've enjoyed National Science Week and my talk about glass.