Studying history from throwaway ephemera

Interesting 9 minute audio telling the story of how throwaway ephemera plays a part in understanding and preserving history.

"A history of the modern world as told by everyday throwaway ephemera"

https://archive.org/details/AHistoryModernWorldThrowawayEphemeraPRI

http://www.lib.usm.edu/spcol/exhibitions/past_exhibits/rrephemera_exhib https://essaydune.com/write-my-thesis/ephemera-and-its-research-value
A throwaway culture makes it possible to understand the core values and principles of historical events learned through ages.

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One more reference: Throwaway History: Brand Ephemera and Consumer Culture by Michael Heller and Aidan Kelly. It's published in the Journal of Macromarketing an analysis of the Museum of Brands, Packaging & Advertising in London that shows how we may use ephemera and brand artifacts to learn more about culture and history. I can email an Institutional Access login and password, if someone is interested (can't share the login details here, unfortunately).

I used to enjoy a hobby called bottle hunting where you searched for peoples trash from long ago. Of course most had long since disintigrated, but there was much to learn about groups of people by their trash.

On one location where a family had lived in a home place for a few hundred years there was virtually no achoholic beverage containers in the trash. A well to do family. Written history of the family indicates they used to entertain famous guests like George and Martha Washington.

One place was at the bottom of a large hill in a prominent "subdivision" built in the pre-civil war period not far from my home. It was interesting how neatly the trash (or what remained) was placed. One fellow I dug with stated "it looks like they were trying to built a time capsule" as very little of the glass was broken. Even unbroken ceramic wine bottles were discovered in numorous instances.

For about a decade I took note of the medicine's folks used from a period of around post civil war to about the great depression in America. Back then we didn't give it much thought. We were just interested in adding cool glass items to our collections. Some of the spots you didn't dare go solo, nor unarmed. What we did learn is the locals would be wary of you at first but if you left some treasure behind at the end of the day you had protection from then on. It was un-nerving to hear fireworks in the distance in the daytime, especially when you realized them aint fireworks.

One thing we'd find a lot of were ceramic marbles. And buttons. We surmized that children had been entertained with marbles games and that a ceramic button lasted longer than a metal button as we found zero metal buttons. At one location there were holes in the bank big enough for a doberman to climb in and out of. Then one day we saw what did. Rats. Gigantic rats. Holy Moley!! We did not return to that one. Not because of the 12 pound rats, but because nearly all of the glass was broken, chipped or smashed.

At one point I did a lot of reading up on things we had found. Trying to understand what some of the junk we had found was used for back in the day or how it was manufactured. For me that was nearly as fun as the actual treasure hunting itself. Mostly trivial knowledge in case I'm ever on Jeopardy and they ask about ancient bottle manufacturing so of no real practical purpose I suppose except……
To post this story on this thread two days before Christmas in 2019.

Fixer,

What are these locations like today when you say dangerous?

Very interesting, by the way.

Best,

RL

Well red, some of those areas have been revitalized. Some have remained 'hostile' if you wanna call it that.

The community trash pits were excavated and trash hauled to landfills where the ones on old home places typically became somebodys back yard over looking the river when the family subdivided the land. Some, I do not know the current circumstance of. One was a homeplace of some cousins uncle inlaw of Thomas Jefferson's cousin's brothers nephew or something and that land is set aside for historic value. One really cool dump became an expansion for Titmus Optical to store packages of lenses they produce. Another is an apartment complex. Stuff like that. Often we found out about the dump sites through construction workers discovering them when a project began. Once they were discovered it often took the owner a few days to decide how to pay for its disposal so we had a few days to find treasure. Other sites I worked alone since it was generally a safe location.

Around y2k I was speaking with a former day worker turned backhoe operator about some places I had dug for bottles. One was where he had lived as a teen and he described what life was like living in that place where us bottle hunters heard gunfire in the distance. He spoke of the current (at that time) situation had turned around and normal life was normal. He said the kids all turned away from thug life. He himself was a recovered heroine addict who later died from aids he got from sharing needles. I was told there were hundreds of people at his funeral as he had played a big role in his community helping others leave the gutter life.

One spot where a few bottles I still display in my home has a Wal Mart sitting on it.


Angel figurines, a bayer aspirin bottle and vicks sampler with metal tops intact and a cod liver oil bottle from the 1910's.