Peter Iler and his brother Joseph had long been producing alcohol when they settled in Omaha in 1866 and founded the Iler Distillery. In 1880 they were listed in the city’s business directory as “importers, processors and wholesale merchants of wines, spirits and cigars and manufacturers of Kennedy’s East India Bitters.”
With this background, it is not surprising that archaeologists were interested in a bottle of this brand filled with a dark yellowish liquid that was recovered from a private site in Washington state. The alleged malt whiskey made more than 100 years ago was stored on the shelves of the Burke Museum in Seattle, where it spent approximately 15 years, until two researchers from the University of Idaho appeared.
Mark Warner and Ray von Wandruszka have spent more than a decade conducting chemical analyzes of materials excavated from various American sites. After studying up to 500 objects, the results obtained have been surprising. All that glitters is not gold and some artifacts were even dangerous.
In the case of the Iler’s bottle, experts observed a sample of the alleged alcoholic beverage in their laboratory and found that the watery liquid had a notable content of potassium, phosphorus and, especially, urea, a chemical compound found mainly in urine, sweat and fecal matter.
“We were left in little doubt that the liquid was not actually a distillery product but urine. The bottle had obviously been reused and we could speculate that it was used as a container of convenience, to avoid a nighttime trip to the latrine,” Warner and Von Wandruszka write in an article published in the journal Advances in Archaeological Practice.
The search for these specialists did not end here. Their first step on this project, for example, led them to focus on a collection of 19th-century deposits found in 2008 during an excavation in the northern Idaho town of Sandpoint. In total there were almost 600,000 artifacts, including sealed glass bottles that contained mysterious products.
During the study, archaeologists found examples of creams and ointments, iron and tar tonics, along with empty containers labeled “poison,” bullets containing gunpowder and even a human tooth with a filling made from zinc.
At the same location they also found a bottle of “Gouraud’s Oriental Cream,” a creamy white substance that turned out to be mercury chloride, also called calomel, which was used during the 18th and 19th centuries for all sorts of things, from preventing acne until treating yellow fever. It was discontinued when doctors realized that mercury was very harmful to health.
The advertisement said that this product gave a “pearly glow” to the user’s skin and that it eliminated unsightly blemishes. In the mid-19th century, calomel was taken as a cure for diseases ranging from cancer to ingrown toenails. Although it is not extremely toxic, if ingested it can cause mercury poisoning.
“Over these years we have identified artifacts that could have implications for the health and safety of people working in museum warehouses along with others classified as disgusting materials that no one would want to put on their shelves if they knew what they were,” they point out.
About 6% of the artifacts analyzed by Mark Warner and Ray von Wandruszka could be described as “harmful, toxic or disgusting.” This includes materials that contain toxins such as mercury, arsenic, lead, selenium, strychnine, and phosphine-producing compounds.
From California, for example, they received a small jar of ant-fighting paste manufactured by Kellogg’s at the beginning of the 20th century and discovered that it still contained arsenic. They also found a vial of toxic phosphorus-based rodenticides from an old New England hospital and aluminum phosphide tablets from a Florida school.
“A broken vial of phosphide or a leaky 100-year-old bottle of urine can only lead to an unpleasant cleaning job, but it could be much worse,” the paper’s authors write. Like finding a jar with a match that explodes at the most unexpected moment.
