Taking the waters: Stoneware jugs and the taste of home they contained.

摘要

From Sitka, Alaska, to Capetown, South Africa, salt-glazed stoneware jugs in both quart and pint sizes appear in excavations of nineteenth-century sites. Often reported in the archaeological and collectors' literature as containers for gin or ginger beer, the Westerwald region of Germany manufactured millions of these jugs for the mineral water trade. My analysis of at least five dozen jugs discovered in 1999 in Virginia City, Nevada, emphasized the dearth of reliable information about the origins, construction, and distribution of these mass produced containers. In this paper I build on that analysis and examine more closely this early example of German pre-industrial mass production techniques, present a means of dating jug manufacture, and explore German influence in the international mineral water trade. I identify the waters that were imported into the mining west and offer an hypothesis about why they were imported.