A View Through a Bottle: An Artifact Study from Heaven Hill Farm (2025)

Buried beneath layers of the discarded past, amber fragments of glass unearthed at historic Heaven Hill Farm, in Lake Place, New York, offer a glimpse through time. I chose to examine a medicine bottle found in the midden—essentially a trash pile— during the 2024 SUNY Potsdam’s archeological field school. What can we learn from this artifact? At Heaven Hill Farm, Anna Newman, a wealthy transplant to the area, employed many community members. This bottle sheds light on local consumption patterns, societal attitudes toward medicine, and trade networks in the days when Anna Newman and community members walked the grounds.