Commentson the artefacts for display at the

FREMANTLE PRISON TUNNELS,FREMANTLE, WA
for

SANDRA MURRAY
FREMANTLE PRISONDEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND
WORKS
14 MARCH 2005
ALISTAIR PATERSON

eureka archaeological research and consulting

Eureka Archaeological Research and Consulting UWA
Director: Kate Morse, PhD

Consultant: Ian Ryan, BA (Hons)

Copyright
This document and the information it contains is subject to copyright and may
not be copied in whole or part without written consent of Eureka
Archaeological Research and Consulting UWA and Fremantle Prison
Authority.

Disclaimer
Eureka Archaeological Research and Consulting is not responsible foromissions and inconsistencies that may result from information that was notavailable at the time this document was prepared.

ieureka archaeological research and consulting

INTRODUCTION
This document is a supplement to the report by Samantha Bolton (February2005) to the Prison and is intended to answer additional questions raised duringa on-site meeting on Thursday 24 February (9.15-10.30 am) by Sandra Murray
regarding artefacts intended for display at the Fremantle Prison tunnel.

DISCUSSIONFirstly, I have had little success finding out more about metal axe heads nor
metal buckets. The metal buckets should be studied for evidence of breakage
and modification as seen in several buckets. I have also had no luck with thebolts and timber, although I imagine that the metal indicate type of
manufacture and thus indirectly age (such as hand wrought manufacture). The
size of the beams may be determined if the bolt is still set at the width of thebeams.
As discussed, I think a research project on the tunnels may assist with anunderstanding of what the little niches were for, and on a related matter, how
the tunnels were originally lit.
I include some information below about:•Glass bottles•

Clay pipes (for FP-118)•

Enamelled wares (for context to enamel cup)•

Unidentified twisted metal items (metal artefacts 01559, 01561 and
00560)

If you need more material or references for sources please tell me.
Alistair1eureka archaeological research and consulting

Glass bottles
Archaeological material are differentiated and interpreted through theidentification of diagnostic attributes. In historical archaeology artefacts arecommonly considered in terms of function (e.g., a clay pipe for smoking) andchronology (e.g., a clay pipe made by Thomas White and Co. between 1825
and 1870). Similarly, archaeologists rely on glass artefacts for different
interpretive purposes, such as, to infer site chronology, the nature and length ofsite occupation, and the evidence for consumption patterns and for trade. Aspart of a research design archaeologists often spend a great deal of time
describing and analysing the glass artefacts.
What attributes are used for determining method of manufacture, period of
manufacture, and use? The key attributes are colour and evidence for
manufacturing technique; however other useful attributes are evidence of
information about the maker of the bottles or its original contents, and bottle
shape that may also indicate its original use (for example, Dutch case ginbottles, milk bottles, and salad oil bottles all have distinctive shapes).
Most dating techniques for bottle glass are related to changes in manufacturing
techniques over time. The main attributes used in glass artefacts are:
• Colour•

Evidence for manufacturing (presence/absence of certain attributes)•

Type of finish (how the bottle was sealed)•

Evidence for maker’s marks (these can describe the manufacturer of thecontainer, or the contents)

Remember that the earliest date of manufacture may not actually be the datethe deposit was formed; although this is not relevant for Fremantle Prison
Tunnels as the artefacts were not recorded using archaeological techniques andare thus ‘out of context’. For example, there may be a “manufacturing lag”
between the time a bottle was made, filled, imported to the site (probably from
Europe or eastern Australia by sea), sold, and used. Even after use a bottle may
be re-used for an extended period of time. In fact, you would expectconservation of items in a prison.
Using the assemblage from the Fremantle Prison described in Samantha
Bolton’s report as a basis, the following information may prove useful for
signage. In the tables presented here greyed out areas indicate that these
attributes were present at in the collection.

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Parts of the bottle

Figure 1. Parts of a bottle (from Burke and Smith 2004 Figure 6.8 p.187)

GLASS ATTRIBUTES
ColourOlive-dark

Dark olive or black glass (1830-1870). Looks black when on the ground but the actual
colour can be seen when held against a strong light; usually pre-1890 for alcohol bottles(as suggested by the Bitters bottles, FP-18, FP-19, FP-20 and FP-21).

Olive

Lighter olive colour, normally for alcohol (for example, the Brandy bottle marked ‘6 toa gallon’—FP-22). There are also olive bitters bottles (FP-18, FP-19, FP-20 and FP-21).

TintedAny glass that is clear overall, but has some colour (20 examples in collection). It may
have a hint of colour that is only seen from the side, or it may be darker.

Amethyst

Specifically refers to glass that is purple in colour; c.1890-1916.

ColourlessHas absolutely no colour whatsoever; nearly always modern (20th C) as for 25 examples
in the collection

Amber

Dark brown glass usually used for beer bottles (one example, FP-49); 19th century –3

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modern. Used for small medicinal-type bottles or for foods (as indicated by BONOX
inscriptions on FP-09 and FP-10, and possibly the screw finish for FP-90)
Blue

Cobalt blue colour, usually used for medicine bottles; 19th century – modern (post 1845)4

eureka archaeological research and consulting

Evidence for manufacturing technique
The attributes that may prove useful for determine manufacturing techniquerelate to the general trend in the 19th century to move from hand-blown bottles(asymmetrical in form), to semi-mould made bottles (with the parts of thebottle below the finish made in a mould of some form, with the closure being
applied separately while molten), to—in the 20th century—bottles fully made in
moulds (as indicated by seams running from the body through to the top of thefinish). Those bottles with panelled sides are made in moulds of some kind, as
are any with any form of embossed writing.
There are several good sources for glass bottles, although the figures used here
largely derive from Burke and Smith (2004) who summarise earlier work
(Boow 1991, Jones and Sullivan 1989, Jones 1979, Smith 1987, Tasker 1989).

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Figure 2. Shape in horizontal and vertical planes (from Burke and Smith 2004
Figure 6.9 p.189)

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Bases

Before 1870

Pontil markConical push up

Dome push up

1820-1920
Ricketts(written on base)1940 onwards(common on beer bottles)
Stippling on bottle base

Other dateable attributes
Seals applied as a glass blob on
the shoulder
Embossed lettering
Paper labels

More common before 1840, but
found today
1821-1920s
Common from 1850s onwards

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Types of finish (how the bottle was sealed)

Single collar

Double collar
Clear glass: 1840early 20th century

Lightening
Patented 1875 US,
found on wide
mouth jars fromc1890

Perry-Davis

Crown seal
1907 onwards
more popular after
1920 with automatedmanufacturing

Flared1890-1920

Codd patentseal
1873-1895

External screw
1885-1960

Prescription
1890-1920

Ring seal
Until 1920
(still sone
champagnes today)

Blob top
1860-1920

Blob top
1860-1920

Whole bottle shapes

Torpedo or Hamilton
1809-1900

Case Gin
1700s until 19308

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Turn or paste mould
1720-1920

Vinegar/Oil
1870-1930

Dip mould
1760-c.1870

Continuous two piece mould
1903 onwards

Three piece mould
1820-1840
1900-1920

Two piece mould (full length)c.1750-c.1900-1930

Ricketts mould
1820-1920

Perry Davis9eureka archaeological research and consulting

Two piece mould with separate base1850 to present
The different types of manufacture in the assemblage were: hand blown(probably pre-1870) and machine-made. Moulds included 2 piece moulds withseparate base (mainly in clear glass). Many bottles were mould made, assuggested by the Ricketts mould, panelled sides, and embossed lettering.
There were a range of finishes present; some applied separately indicating prefully-automated production. The best way to see this is with seams: they willcontinue through to the top of the bottle closure in fully-automated bottle
production. Other finishes were external screw finish (for food and medicine),prescription finish (for medicinal bottles), crown finish (for beers), double
collar finish (normally alcohol), single collar finish and Perry Davis finish (fora specific vegetable pain killer).

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BOTTLE MAKERS
These are the main trends in AGM maker’s marks for Australia, although they
were not present in this group of artefacts.

a) AGM interlinked 1912-1922b.) 1922-1933c.) 1934-1948
Figure 3. Australian Glass Maker (AGM) inscriptions (from Burke and Smith 2004 Table A3.1
p.369-370)

References for glass artefacts
BOOW, J. 1991. Early Australian Commercial Glass: Manufacturing
Processes, Heritage Council of NSW, Sydney.
BURKE, H. and SMITH, C. 2004. The archaeologist's field handbook,
Allen & Unwin, Crow's Nest, N.S.W.
GRAHAM, M. 1981. Australian Glass of the 19th and Early 20th
Century, David Ell Press, Sydney.
JONES, O. 1971. 'Glass bottle push-ups and pontil marks', Historical
Archaeology 5 62-73.

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JONES, O. R. and SULLIVAN, E. The Parks Canada Glass Glossary
for the Description of Containers, Tableware, Closure and Flat Glass.
Canada Parks,
MILLER, G. L. and SULLIVAN, C. 1984. 'Machine-made glass
containers and the end of production for mouth-blown bottles', Historical
Archaeology 18 (2), 84-96.
VADER, J. 1975. Antique Bottle Collecting in Australia, Ure Smith,Sydney.
WHITE, J. R. 1977. 'Bottle nomenclature: a glossary of landmark
terminology for the archaeologist', Historical Archaeology 12 58-67.

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Enamel cup
Enamel techniques for cooking vessels were apparently made from the mid19th century onwards. The use of enamel coating in industrial manufacture isreferred to from the nineteenth century, the enamel allowing for rust freecooking pots and pans. Robyn Stocks, an archaeologist from Sydney, informs
us that enamelled ware was imported to Australia from the 1880s or the early
1900s from the UK & USA, and that there is little information about:•end dates of importation•

early enamel colours and shapes•

local manufacture•

importation

There is longevity of forms and continued use, both of which make dating
artefacts difficult. Part of the absence of information is that general references
to collectable household metal wares often do not mention enamelled wares.
Robyn suggests that it may be possible to determine the period of manufacturefrom the weld:•“Fire or Pug or butt weld like thumb print, doesn’t tend to rust, weld
may be slightly sunken.

•

Scarf weld for harder steel from the end of the 18th century, raised join.

•

Gas or butt weld of iron and mild steel brazed with steel, brass orbronze, weld may be slightly raised.

•

Cleft weld replaced butt due to improvements to steel making it lessductile.

•Electric arc welding, from beginning 20th century, use of flux rod onto
metal butt join. Similar appearance to fire welding of iron but may beslightly bumpy, and may have spatter from flux (iron melts but doesn’trun).” (Stocks, Robyn, electronic communication, March 2005)

References for enamelled wares
Robyn suggests several sources:•

Rachel Field 1984 Irons in the Fire. A History of Cooking Equipment.
Marlborough: The Crowwood Press.

•

See Sears Roebuck catalogue (1906)•

Peter Cuffley 1984 Chandeliers and Billy Tea. A Catalogue ofAustralian Life 1880-1940. Victoria: The Five Mile Press.

13eureka archaeological research and consulting•

Feldheim, Gotthelf and Company catalogue (1905) (Enamelled ware on
pp. 59-62 includes a wide range of objects including plates, pots,
dishes, kettles, strainers etc with white, blue & white and grey enamel.)14

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Clay pipes
This section describes the use of clay pipes to interpretation of archaeologicalsites. There was only one pipe found in the material associated with the tunnels(FP-118), which may suggest two things:•

prisoners were not smoking, or that•broken pipes were rare, suggesting a high level of care in their use as
clay pipes are fragile and break easily.
However, we cannot say anything reliable from an archaeological perspective
as there was no archaeological sampling involved.

Figure 4: Clay pipe bowl associated with Fremantle Prison tunnels (FP-118).
The pipe has rouletting around mouth and a pronounced heel (rarer after 1880).
Some background information may be useful. Clay pipes are valuable fordating deposits. This requires determining the pipe manufacturer or when thepipe was made on stylistic grounds. Good sources are Oswald (1975) who lists
the manufacturers of clay pipes in the United Kingdom from directories andDavey (1979) for detailed information concerning Scottish manufacturers.

Figure 5: Clay pipes (from Orser and Fagan 1995, p.103.)
Most nineteenth century tobacco pipes were made from white clay andconsisted of a stem and bowl (for pipe anatomy see Dane & Morrison 1979, pp.
4-5; Orser & Fagan 1995, p. 103). Pipes were often embossed with maker and15

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product names, and with decorative attributes making the determination of the
manufacturer possible. Most pipes found in colonial Australia were exported
from Scotland, the main nineteenth century producer of pipes.
Dating clay pipes
Changes in pipe form between the late-1500s and the early-twentieth century
have been used by archaeologists to determine age. Formulaic dating based on
the regression curve of regular changes in pipe stem diameter (Binford 1961;
Oswald 1975) are of ‘little value’ after 1750 (Oswald 1975, p. 126) as for mostpipes the bore size remains relatively constant. For this reason in Australianarchaeological studies (Dane & Morrison 1979) bore size is not recorded. The
exception are pre-1750 shipwrecks.
Consequently the primary dating method in Australia involves the comparisonof manufacturer mark or decorative elements with historic directories andcollections from other archaeological sites. This is not possible with the bowl
fragment from Fremantle Prison. Oswald (1975: 37-41) proposes dating pipes
by their general shape, although the usefulness of this approach is reduced by
the many local variations in shape. Oswald’s shape criteria propose that spurs
such as that found on the one example from the Prison are rare after 1880.
Clay pipe makers and studies
There are generic pipe types made by several makers, one common form being
Cutty varieties. Gallagher (1987a, p. 72) states these may be without a maker’s
name. Another feature are numbers along the stem which most commonly
indicate the mould variation. Decorative elements imparted by moulds became
increasingly popular after 1850. These too were common to several
manufacturers.
During the nineteenth century pipes were made in the United Kingdom,
Ireland, France and Holland. Pipe production centred on Glasgow and
Edinburgh whose pipes were traded throughout the world. Pipes made after
1891 for the large American market were required under the McKinley Tariff
Act (Gallagher 1987a, p. 73) to have the country of origin marked, not the
town as was the practice previously. There is evidence however for Scottish
pipes to be marked ‘Scotland’ by the mid-nineteenth century (Gallagher 1987a,p.73).
It seems likely that pipes made for an Australian market also changed in 1891,
even though some pipes were made specifically for an Australian market, assuggested by the catalogue for W. White, Glasgow who list a ‘Long
Australian’, ‘Short Australian’, ‘Kangaroo’, and ‘Small and Large Sydney’(Gallagher 1987b, pp. 148-63).
The majority of research into clay pipe assemblages has occurred in theAmericas and in Europe. As Brassey stresses ‘in Australia and New
Zealand…we have had to rely heavily on publications that have originatedfrom the Northern hemisphere’ (1991, p. 27). Birmingham (1971, p. 5)
suggested that patterns of trade to Australia could be compared with Canada
and the USA by comparing clay pipe corpora. The growing corpus of
excavated material in Australia and New Zealand from the nineteenth century
16eureka archaeological research and consulting

requires collation and publication to facilitate comparative analysis fromsmaller archaeological assemblages. This would recognise the potential thatclay pipes are a resource which, as Foster states regarding New Zealand, butequally applicable to Australia may ‘establish narrower time spans…for
historic sites’ (Foster 1983, p. 94). An important reference is Dane andMorrison’s (1979) description of clay-pipes from Port Arthur dated to between
1830 and 1877. Another great overview of clay pipes in Australian archaeology
is provided by Gojak and Stuart (1991).
References for clay pipes
BINFORD, L. R. 1961. 'A new method of calculating dates from kaolin
pipestems', Southeastern Archaeological Conference Newsletter 9 (1),BIRMINGHAM, J. 1971. 'Clay tobacco pipes', Australian Historical
Archaeology Association Newsletter 1 (3), 4-6.
DANE, A. and MORRISON, R. 1979. Clay pipes from Port Arthur 18301877: A Descriptive Account of the Clay Pipes from Maureen Byrne's
1977-78 Excavations at Port Arthur, Southeast Tasmania, Departmentof Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National
University, Canberra.
DAVEY, P. J. and POGUE, D. J. 1979. The Archaeology of the clay
tobacco pipe, B.A.R., Oxford.
FOSTER, D. 1983. 'Clay pipes from the Cromwell district, Central
Otago', New Zealand Archaeological Association Newsletter 26 (2), 94101.
FRESCO-CORBU, R. 1982. European Pipes, Lutterworth Press,
Guidford.
GALLAGHER, D. B. 1987. 'The 1900 price list of the Pipe Makers'
Society', in DAVEY, P. (ed), The Archaeology of the Clay Tobacco Pipe:
X. Scotland, British Archaeological Research Series 178, Oxford, 142164.
GALLAGHER, D. B. 1987. 'Nineteenth and twentieth century Edinburgh
pipemakers', in DAVEY, P. (ed), The Archaeology of the Clay Tobacco
Pipe: X. Scotland, British Archaeological Research Series 178, Oxford,
31-34.
GOJAK, D. and STUART, I. 1999. 'The potential for archaeologicalstudies of clay tobacco pipes from Australian sites', Australian Historical
Archaeology 17 38-49.
ORSER JR, C. E. and FAGAN, B. M. 1995. Historical Archaeology,
Harper Collins College Publishers, New York.
OSWALD, A. 1975. Clay Pipes for the Archaeologist, British
Archaeological Report Series, 14, Oxford.
17eureka archaeological research and consulting

OSWALD, A. 1983. 'Sources of Port Royal pipes', in DAVEY, P. E. (ed),The Archaeology of the Clay Tobacco Pipe, British Archaeological
Report Series, 8, Oxford, 255-258.

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Metal artefacts 01559, 01561 and 00560
The artefacts pictured here seem to have been bent through use, with force
related to the eyelet at one end from where the force presumably originatedfrom. I have had several suggestions to the possible use of these items, which I
include below with thanks. I prefer Paul’s suggestion that they were pry bars,
although further research is required.
The suggestions provided were:
1. Handles for flue vent2. Weapons or an auger
3. Pry bars

Figure 6. Metal artefacts 01559, 01561 and 00560
Suggestion 1: Handles for flue vent
“Possibly handles associated with some sort of flue vent. I'm guessing the twist
makes the shaft turn 90 degrees? The end may have been attached to some sortof flat rectangular seal. When the handle was then pulled it would pull
backthrough a slot, turning through 90 degrees (and thereby blocking asimilarly shaped hole behind the first one. This would have un-blocked
whatever the thing was blocking, possibly allowing ventilation or change of air
direction. Its a typical sort of furnace flue operating device- but then could besomething totally different! This is just an educated guess. The handle certainly
suggests a pulling action. Did the prison have a boiler room?”19eureka archaeological research and consulting

Wayne Johnson (Sydney Cove Authority)
Suggestion 2: Weapons or an auger“Apart from obvious chains and files, many of the other ubiquitous steel items
could be weapons or like ( or may have been cadged for that purpose). They allseem too ephemeral to be stone cutting devices, though a twist could indicate
an auger or drill.”
Martin Carney (AMAC Group)
Suggestion 3: Pry bars
“They look suspiciously like 'pry bars' to me – used in manual
quarrying/mining by inserting under or beside large blocks to either move theblock in short efforts by 'prying' (i.e., using the bar as a lever against a fulcrum;or alternatively to lift one edge of the block up or across to allow the entry of
the point or blade of a more substantial hand tool (e.g., crowbar) or lifting
apparatus (e.g., a rope or sling from the pulley set or block-and-tackle working
off a sheerlegs or gin pole). The bending may result from use on heavy blocks,
but could also have been intentional for example to save the operator frombending in heavy lifts.”
Paul Rheinberger20