The Dating Game

An interesting article on the dating of old bottles. The author describes how the analysis of a large assemblage of amber glass bottles, excavated by the University of Texas at El Paso. Several were Owens-Illinois bottles but the patterns on the bases did not match any description from Toulouse's Bottle Makers and Their Marks. This set the author on a quest to look at as many O-I bottles as possible to see which patterns occurred regularly. As a result, a more refined way to date O-I bottles from the 1940-46 period was discovered, as described here.