Beach Combing

I'm sure this won't come as a great surprise to anyone, but I am a beach combing addict. Shocker right...especially for someone who professes to be obsessed with things like archaeology. One of the thing I love to find on the beach is glass. In the little town where I live, my kids and I have this special place we go every year once the water level on the river starts to drop. We call it Beach Glass Cove. If it has another name, we are not aware of it. (We would ignore it anyways cause our name is so much cooler!) We gave it this name because of the outrageous amount of glass we find there every year. Granted glass isn't the only thing we find there but its the primary find. The trick to finding the most glass however is to get there first. Annoyingly enough, we are not the only ones who know about this hidden gem. There is one other person that I am aware of that makes the trek from the normal walking path, through the back yard of a local lodge and down a short hop, skip and a jump through a wooded patch. We only discovered it because of our innate ability to wonder off into places we are not suppose to be. If the other lady makes it there first she snags up all the best glass and uses it to make jewelry. I used to think this was a really cool idea which is why I started to collect it. But after a couple of years I found myself rushing to the beach in late winter, early spring to snag it all up and save it from the jewelry making lady. I only started to want to save it after I realized how amazing some of it is. My collection now is massive and since the river is beginning to drop (a little early this year) and the weather has been uncommonly nice, I am already planning on adding to it. I would have been down there today had I not been talked out of it. (Que annoyed face.)

I thought about my collection, gathering dust today because of my visit to the fort. Yes I went and now I am an official volunteer lab tech! (Happy dance!) On the tour of their archives I got to see all the amazing pottery they have found on the grounds of the fort. This got me to thinking about my favorite type of beach glass, porcelain. That's right! I find porcelain all the time at our little cove. Most of the time it is pretty nondescript. White and crackly, soft from the waves. On occasion though I find some that is generally very interesting. This train of thought lead me to thinking about my blog and how I should post pictures of my glass for others to see. I can't be the only one out there who loves beach glass right? So, I pulled out my dusty box and sorted out all the porcelain and my favorite pieces of glass to share so that others can see all the awesomeness I have. Without further ado, here ya go!


The following two pictures are all of the porcelain I have in my collection. As you can see it comes in various sizes and there is a couple different types. The top batch is pretty much your classic type of porcelain. Then there is the random green piece. (Only one I have found of its kind). In the second picture at the bottom is some really nice porcelain that still has its shinny glaze on it.

I love the little curved piece at the bottom right. When I look at it I think of a horses tail. :)

The next picture is of my favorite piece in my entire collection. It is a chuck of porcelain that has a little character to it. In the top point of the shard are two very small blue dots. Probably part of the original design. Based on the size of the fragment and the size of the curved lip on the bottom I would say that this was originally part of a saucer.

This one is cool just because of the detail left on it after all the smoothing that has occurred out in the water. It's a little hard to see but there are three rings around this piece. 

This is the bottom lip of the blue dotted porcelain pictured above.
 

The following pic is what I call the horse tail. Was it once a horse tail on a porcelain figurine? I don't know. But it sure is super awesome!

This group picture is of my favorite glass pieces. I like these because they still have a large amount of detail left on them after making their way from their point of origin to my little cove. 

I am 99% sure this one used to belong to one of those thick beer mugs that have the grooved sides. The glass is very thick and the grooves are still present even though they are hard to see in this picture.

 This picture is a little deceptive. This bottle neck is actually really small. I should have taken a picture of it wrapped around my pinky to give you some scale. The edges are smooth but the glasses shine and detail are still amazingly intact. This leads me to believe it hasn't been in the water very long.

This is another really cool piece. It had started to fog up by the time it got to me but you can still see all of the edges around it. There are four ring edges total. I have no idea what this one may have come from.

Look closely at the next photo. Do you see them? There are tiny little bubble like impressions on this glass. If you run your finger over them you can still feel the bubbles raised up out of the glass. This is an extremely tiny piece and based on the curve, whatever it came from must have been small too.

This glass (although it's a little tough to see) has a frosted look to it. The frosting on the glass is raised waves all over the glass. This is not a result of being in the river because the other side is completely smooth.

This is a newer chunk of glass. I like it because it shows the side of the bottle, the bottom edge that it would have set on and a small portion of the bottom of the glass. Even though I would never be able to identify the bottle I still feel like this one holds a lot of information.

Here's another one to take a close look at. Can you see the R? This piece of glass is incredibly small, (smaller than a dime). The R on the glass is perfectly intact!

Pretty sure this one is a beer bottle bottom. I like it because the detailed ridges are still there after bouncing around in the waves. It's also a newer piece of glass. Cut myself on this one pulling it up out of the sand.

Here's another one with some great detail left over.

When I first found these I thought they had been really beat up in the waves but then I realized all the crazy stuff going on on the bottom was a design. It gives me the impression of the design you would find on the bottom of a beer bottle. The glass is thin though, much thinner than the glass I find that I know comes from beer bottles. I almost thought it was plastic when I pulled it up.

 The final pic is just an example of all the different kinds of glass I find and the wide range of color variation. Check out the piece of terracotta up top. The white on it is not an adhesive or wear. It appears to be porcelain. Crazy huh?!

For any archaeologist who look at these pictures, no. I have not recorded any provenience on these items other than that they came from Beach Glass Cove. I go there every year, pick up as much glass as I can find and then I take it home. The next year, I go back and there is a new batch of glass that comes in over the winter. Some of it has been in the water a really long time, to the point you can barely tell its glass. Some of it is so new that you can cut yourself on it because the edges have not smoothed out. The glass that is new I leave there, to be picked up by other people or to be swept away to be made smooth by the waves. I hope to add some new, unique pieces to my collection this year. One of these days I might even take the steps necessary to try to figure out where the porcelain comes from. I can't imagine people are stumbling around on the beach breaking plates. I can see that with the beer bottles but not the porcelain. Fun research project maybe? Hmm....