Don’t keep it bottled up: an analysis of black glass wine bottles at Historic Huguenot Street New Paltz, NY

Abstract

Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz New York has been a site of human activity stretching back well over nine thousand years, including the Native American Munsee speakers and the French Huguenots who settled New Paltz in 1677. Archaeological excavations over the past twenty years have helped to uncover the rich prehistory and history at the site. In this paper I introduce and examine seventeenth century English black glass wine bottles, as objects of analysis that help illuminate the material culture and foodways of these early Huguenots. Furthermore, I demonstrate how an analysis of this material culture and their foodways, excavated from Historic Huguenot Street builds a data set on the social and economic lives of the Huguenots that the written record does not. This paper will draw heavily from the theoretical framework of Louis Binford’s trinomic categorization of artifacts into the ideotechnic, sociotechnic and technomic spheres to analyze the artifacts in question and gain insight on the interaction between the Huguenots and the world around them.