Posted on 01/24/2025 9:20:52 AM PST by Red Badger
A student used imaging technology to peek inside without popping the cork.
The bottle appears to have been made between 1790 and 1840.
Image courtesy of Josephine McKenzie
The mystery of a 200-year-old bottle has been solved. It turns out, it wasn’t a vessel for booze, but a “witch bottle” filled with pee and a bunch of botanicals to ward off malevolent spirits.
The bottle, still intact with its original cork and filled with liquid, was unearthed at a building site in the seaside town of Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire, UK. The owner of the property passed it on to the University of Lincoln’s Conservation of Cultural Heritage department with two requests: to preserve the object, and to identify the liquid within the bottle without removing the cork.
“I received the email of inquiry about the bottle around a year ago, and I was keen to accept it in as a student project. We get numerous inquiries regarding some very varied objects, but we’d never accepted something quite like this before,” Josephine McKenzie, a Senior Technician for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage department, told IFLScience.
“It really is quite a fascinating and rare object,” McKenzie added.
The task was taken up by Zara Yeates, a third-year undergraduate student, who was immediately drawn to the strange artifact.
Witch bottles are part of a folk tradition from the 18th and 19th centuries that involves placing glass bottles in a house to talismans to ward off evil spirits. They're most common in the UK, although the tradition was carried across the Atlantic to the US too.
In this part of the UK, the bottles often contain objects like small animal bones, iron nails, nail clippings, and other materials linked to superstition and the belief in sympathetic magic.
Multispectral imaging results of the mystery bottle. Image courtesy of Josephine McKenzie To determine if the bottle contained any of these symbolic materials, which would suggest it was a true witch bottle, Yeates conducted an X-ray of the relic. To her surprise, the bottle contained no large solid objects – primarily just liquid with small amounts of sediment.
This led Yeates and the team to speculate whether the object was in line with a similar tradition in East Anglia, a neighboring region of Lincolnshire, whereby witch bottles were filled with urine and botanicals, such as leaves, herbs, or flowers.
The use of XRF (X-ray fluorescence) analysis and multispectral imaging was able to confirm these suspicions: the bottle contained bodily fluid and small amounts of degraded plant material.
The most likely explanation is that the bottle was a witch bottle inspired by the traditions of nearby East Anglia. Alternatively, it may reflect a different practice common among sailors, where a bottle filled with urine was buried at their home as a superstitious measure to ensure a safe return from their voyages.
Yeates told the BBC that the builders who found the bottle thought it contained rum and were planning on drinking it – so, regardless of the bottle's original function, it’s a good job they didn’t.
She reportedly said that this particular bottle shape was introduced in 1790 and its unevenness indicated it was hand-blown. Since the molds to make bottles were only introduced in 1840, this implies the bottle was crafted within this 50-year window around the beginning of the 19th century.
The mystery of the bottle is solved, but its adventure continues. After being further conserved by Yeates, the artifact will be on display at the University of Lincoln’s Conservation of Cultural Heritage final-year degree show in June 2025, before being returned to its owner (still filled with its historical pee).
LOL…groan. I count five bad ones in that one sentence. Awesome! Hard to top.
Just because it’s urine now doesn’t mean it wasn’t rum at one time.
Should’ve sold it on the collectors’ market before testing it. A crowd of people with more money than sense would have bid a 200 year old bottle of rum up to eight figures. If Johnny Depp has any money left, he would probably end up in a bidding war with Keith Richards and push it higher.
And then get outbid at the end by someone from Hong Kong.
I’m in if urine!
Can anyone prove that pee in a rum bottle doesn’t keep the witches away? I mean, you could ask the witches, and they’ll tell you “We were gonna turn that guy into a newt but he’s got a bottle of pee on his front stoop. Eeeww!” Well, I would, anyway.
Well, they didn’t find any witches there..............
*****
Indeed! Pop the cork on that thing and maybe release one pissed-off genie….
Vintage pee…….mmmmmmmm…
Undoubtedly that is what the archaeologist some 300 years from now will conclude.
Aside from my first guess that this was a joke of some kind they also used stale urine for a number of other things. Like cleaning clothes.
So personally I am the weest bit doubtful about their conclusions.
“gotta go fill the yuengling keg” is code for going to the bathroom at my place...
He was referring to Trucker Bombs of the one gallon size.
🙄............................
I would imagine that 200 year old pee would hold a lot of interest for all kinds of researchers....
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