Though archaeologists may disagree, diggers Fortemeyer and Jordan say it’s better to dig quickly – maybe even sloppily – then to not dig at all.(Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)
Archaeologists are not happy with bottle hunters. Bottle hunters spend their free time digging up outdoor privies – or, 19th century toilets. They’re looking for old glass bottles. But as Samara Freemark reports, they’re catching flak from the professionals.
Transcript
Archaeologists are not happy with bottle hunters. Bottle hunters spend their free time digging up outdoor privies – or, 19th century toilets. They’re looking for old glass bottles. But as Samara Freemark reports, they’re catching flak from the professionals.
If you ever went looking for buried treasure when you were a kid, maybe you can begin to understand just how crazy people can get about digging up bottles.
Take Jack Fortemeyer. When I met him, he was neck-deep in a hole in a backyard in Brooklyn. He was shoveling out a 19th century privy with his partner Scott Jordan. Not so bad for a 70 year old man.
“I told the kids you guys are going to have to do the digging while I sit up on the top in a wheelchair and you’re going to pass me the bottles and so forth. I’m getting to that point.”
Fortemeyer is a bottle digger – a person who digs up backyard privy pits looking for old bottles. The ones they find, they clean and keep. Or they sell them, or trade them with other collectors. Fortemeyer says he’s been hooked for decades.
“Found some bottles, had to find out about them, bought a book, and now I’m hopelessly addicted to it.”
Fortemeyer used to live in suburban Long Island. But he moved to Brooklyn because the buildings here are older. Older buildings mean privy pits – And privy pits… mean bottles.
“That’s why I moved to the neighborhood. To be closer to my pits. To be….I mean, that’s what it’s all about.”
“Jack, I see something….there’s a bottle there…”
So far today Fortemeyer and Jordan have dug up a nice collection of 19th century artifacts. Jordan spreads the pieces they like on a table.
“There’s a tiny piece of black pottery with floral design. a fragment of an 1840s teapot. A brass shirt button, little tiny stars going around the edge.”
He’s in the middle of describing them to me when I trip and step on a shard of pottery that’s been tossed on the ground.
“I think I….don’t worry about that. I think I just stepped on a plate and broke it.
Just more work for me. If we’re laying it on the ground, it’s not that important.”
What is it? Part of a white plate. So typical a lot of it doesn’t get kept.
And that moment right there is maybe the perfect example of why bottle diggers drive some professional archaeologists completely up the wall.
“It just makes us crazy. The bottle hunter, it’s all for them.”
That’s Joan Geisamar. She’s a member of the Professional Archaeologists of New York City – or the P-A-N-Y-C and yes, that acronym is pronounced ‘panic’.
“I have to confess the acronym came before the name, because we’re always in a panic about what’s going on.”
Geisamar says bottle diggers destroy the archaeological record. Professionals dig slowly. Painstakingly. They catalog every fragment, no matter how unglamorous. Diggers, she says, just barge in with shovels, looking for pretty things.
“They take what they want and throw everything else back in. It’s just a record that’s completely lost for personal gain and selfishness. Once it’s lost, it’s lost. And it’s
just morally wrong and professionally wrong.”
But Scott Jordan says in a place like New York, where there’s always development going on, it’s better to dig quickly – maybe even sloppily – then to not dig at all.
“There’s enough being destroyed left and right that we can’t even keep up with it
ourselves. There are so many sites, especially during the building boom in New
York where entire blocks are lost. If we’re there it’s gonna be thrown in a dump truck, put in a landfill. So those artifacts will just be lost.”
He pointed at the schoolyard next door. The playground had been slated for redevelopment. The diggers wanted to get in there. They offered to do presentations at the school, show the kids what they found. Everyone was interested. But jumping through all the official hoops took too long, and in the end, the yard was bulldozed and the site was lost.
For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.