Towards an archaeology of everyday life in British Ionian Islands: the cultural itineraries of the Kythera Gin Bottles

SUMMARY

During the course of the nineteenth century the island of Kythera, Southwest Greece, was part of the United States of Ionian Islands, under the control of the British empire. This paper explores the materiality of colonialism in local contexts, through the object itineraries of a group of stoneware bottles—a class of artefacts that continues to be represented in domestic assemblages locally today. We examine the diverse ways the vessels became entangled with the lives of individuals, colonialist agendas, and collective perceptions of identity, seeking to identify how the meanings associated with the objects and their relational connections shifted across time and space.

Keywords:

• Object itineraries
• stoneware pottery
• gin bottles
• British Ionian Islands
• Kythera

Introduction

For the better part of the nineteenth century the island of Kythera, in southwest Greece, formed part of the United States of the Ionian Islands (Ηνωμένον Κράτος των Ιονίων Νήσων), a semi-autonomous state established in 1809, under the protection of the ever-expanding British Empire. Kythera itself held a peripheral position in the political and economic dynamics of the state, whose administrative and financial centre was the island of Corfu, where the governing body and the British Lord Commissioner were seated. The period of the British protectorate on Kythera, but also the Ionian Islands as a whole, has not been the subject of extensive research to date, in neither British nor Greek historical bibliography, mainly due to the former’s more pronounced focus on other parts of the former empire, and the latter’s diachronic orientation towards the preceding period of Venetian presence in the Ionian islands. Even scarcer are attempts for archaeological accounts on the British colonial impact on the islands, the character of interactions between the colonial power and the local island communities, and the ways these encounters contributed to shaping present societies and personal or collective perceptions of identity on the Ionian islands (see also Tzortzopoulou-Gregory 2009 and Gallant 1994, 2002, 2018 as an exception).

Τhe present paper aims to initiate a discussion about an archaeology of everyday life in colonial and post-colonial Ionian Islands having as case study the island of Kythera. We are interested in seeing how locals interacted with artefacts associated with external influences in the nineteenth century and how they interpret the colonial heritage today. Thus, we follow a material-based approach that explores the intersection of the materiality of colonialism and object biographical perspectives. Our aim is to use the cultural itineraries of everyday material culture elements from Kythera, namely a group of stoneware gin bottles, as a starting point for analysing the materiality of daily life in the British protectorate and in doing so to initiate a discussion on the material impact of the colonial presence in matters of heritage on the modern-day island, and how local perceptions on colonialism have shifted through the past two centuries.

Material culture is by default deeply entangled with the ways humans act, interact, and perceive the world they live in. The intrinsic connection between material practices and social processes renders materiality crucial in understanding colonialism, inasmuch as it is intertwined with the ways asymmetrical contacts are articulated and colonial power is physically manifested. As archaeology by nature inadvertently relies heavily on the material record for reconstructing the past in general and intercultural encounters in specific, the archaeological interest in colonialism and its material implications has been increasingly theorised, enhanced by systems theory and especially post-colonial perspectives. The latter fostered wide-ranging archaeological approaches addressing a broad spectrum of colonial interactions (e.g. Gosden 1997; Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002; Stein 2005; van Dommelen 2006; Liebmann and Rizvi 2010; Lydon and Rizvi 2016). While material focus has often been channelled towards the study of objects of outstanding status or collections of artefacts in exhibitions (e.g. Barringer and Flynn 1998; Gosden and Knowles 2001), the potential of ‘everyday’ contexts and material practices for illustrating the complexities of colonial encounters has been recognised (e.g. Miller 1994; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Murray 2004; Hernández Sánchez 2012) and scholarship has explicitly combined archaeological explorations of colonialism with new materialist thinking (e.g. Gosden 2004; van Dommelen 2012).

Acknowledging the significance that human-object interactions hold for structuring and mediating encounters in colonial situations, the present paper takes a closer look into the capacity that object biographies have for providing bottom-up insights into the ways material artefacts and patterns of consumption become interlinked with socio-political realities and the negotiation of identities in colonial environments. Object biography, as initially coined in Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things, and Igor Kopytoff’s seminal contribution to the same volume (1986), presents itself as markedly relevant for such readings, particularly with regards to its emphasis on the aspects of commodification and shifting values. Material artefacts become re-signified and bestowed with new meanings in cross-cultural interactions, as participants with different cultural identities and belief systems merge in local contexts. This could not be any more pertinent to colonial contexts, where power imbalance and dependency also weigh in. With the emergence of new materialisms and post-humanism, new perspectives that have challenged and expanded the biographical approach make it an even more useful analytical tool for the materiality of colonialism, as they prioritise entanglement (Barad 2003, 2007; Hodder 2011, 2012), movement (Ingold 2007), and relationality (Joy 2009). Here we specifically adopt the analytical framework of object itineraries, which has become prominent in current theoretical discourse (Hahn and Weiss 2013; Joyce and Gillespie 2015; Bauer 2019). It encompasses the aforementioned theoretical advances and assumes an ontological point of view that attempts to overcome some of the weaknesses of the biographical metaphor, namely the latter’s linearity and tendency of anthropomorphisation. Object itineraries centre on the meshworks (cf. Ingold 2011) of interactions the objects are entwined with and the changes they undergo across contextual, temporal, or spatial trajectories, as well as changes that might not happen successively, but may instead occur at the same time. They facilitate multi-layered and nuanced analyses, through the exploration of the multiplicity of relationships that objects are embedded in, involving both human and inanimate actors, the ways agency is shared among them, and how meanings are situationally defined and re-formulated on the ground, as part of daily practices and interactions.

To this end, we use as a case study a group of stoneware gin bottles from Kythera, whose period of manufacture falls roughly within the chronological horizon covered by the history of the island as part of the British protectorate and its immediate aftermath. The selection of the specific class of artefacts as the presented case study was determined not only by the strong representation of such stoneware bottles in the material corpus of the Australian Paliochora Kythera Archaeological Survey (APKAS)—a project focused on the cultural landscapes of the northern part of the island—but also by the longevity of this class of vessels in local material practices. For this purpose, we use as complementary evidence a group of stoneware bottles still owned and/or in use by inhabitants today. Even more significantly, as it will be demonstrated, the bottles prove prime subjects for investigating aspects of the manifestation and contest of colonial power and its immediate aftermath, as well as the notions of cosmopolitanism and hybridity on modern-day Kythera. The latter is addressed here through the diverse pathways through which these material culture elements became enmeshed with local practices and the diachronic shifts in the meanings bestowed to them, which offer a close insight into the structure of colonial relationships, and their impact on social realities and on matters of self- and group- identification in a post-colonial context. Outcomes from this endeavour shows that modern day Kytherians have various understanding of the social life of the bottles, and they are clearly connect these with the colonial period. This is not the first time that biographical accounts of stoneware bottles of the late nineteenth century are focus of analytical research on migration, memory, and materiality (see an account on Jeffries 2009) but it is the first time that imported vessels of this type is the focus of analysis in the colonial context of the Ionian Islands.

Kythera during the 19th century

Kythera, is the southernmost island of the Ionian complex, isolated from the other six main islands, situated at a strategically important location, right on the passage between the Peloponnese and Crete, where the Aegean and the Ionian seas meet (Fig. 1). After a long period of Venetian rule that defined the trajectory of social and economic life on the island, and following a brief interlude of French control, Kythera became part of the British protectorate in 1809, until it was ceded to Greece in 1864. Despite holding a peripheral position to Corfu that constituted the colonial centre of political developments among the Ionian islands, Kythera maintained an Ionian identity, open towards Western cultural influences. Under British colonial rule, the island enjoyed very limited autonomy, as its governor and all appointees were strictly controlled, and it did not enjoy a boom of economic activity as pronounced as on other islands of the protectorate (Leontsinis 1987). Its economy continued to be largely dependent on agriculture and its low financial contribution to the United States of the Ionian Islands in combination with the alleged rebellious nature of its inhabitants resulted to Kythera being deemed less valuable to the British in colonial terms (Knox 1984).

Fig 1 (a) A map showing the location of kythera island in Southern aegean. (b) The United States of Ionian Islands in a period map.

The left side of the image shows a map where the location of Kythera is annotated. Kythera showed inside a white box, between the mainland of Greece and the island of Crete. The right side show a nineteenth century map with all Ionian islands are annotated with red coloured stroke.

Nevertheless, during the period of the protectorate, similarly to what is observed on the other Ionian islands, there was a peak in construction activity in public works (Harlan 2011, 345). For instance, during the residency of Captain John MacPhail of the 7th Regiment of Light Dragoons numerous improvements were undertaken, such as the construction of bridges, roads and wells (Fig. 2). MacPhail’s works, among others, specifically included the construction of numerous schools on the island, two long arched bridges at Katouni and Potamos, and the main road of the island that is still in use today (Harlan 2011). These buildings and public works, that were constructed by imperial order are now remembered by the locals as the places constructed with Kytherian philanthropy, labour, and skill (Harlan 2011). Leontsinis (1987, 349), in his social history of the island, states that the schools at Mylopotamos and Livadi ‘were built entirely by voluntary contributions from the inhabitants concerned’, indicating that individuals were ‘inspired by patriotism’ and that they were ‘sensible of the benefits accruing from their children’s education’. The dedicatory plaque at the school building of Livadi cites a local philanthropist, Ioulios Kasimatis, who donated the land. The dedicatory plaques at the schools of both Mylopotamos and Livadi further stress the patriotism of the local inhabitants. While they refer to it as patriotism (obviously the message they wanted to pass on to the populace) it appears to be more like patronage. As a privileged elite (local nobility) they were able to make such donations of land for the ‘public good’. Here we have an interesting example of the interplay between a new colonial power, local nobility and traditional (feudal) control on the one hand, and the ordinary people (popolani) of the island on the other hand.

Fig 2 (a) The British stone bridge at Katouni. (b) The bridge at Potamos. (c) The school at Milapidea. (d) The school at Agios Theodoros.

This is a figure that shows four major building projects from the British period at Kythera. The top left shows a stone built bridge at Katouni. The top right shows the stone built bridge at Potamos. The lower left shows the stone built school at Milapidea, which today lays in ruins. The lower right, shows the renovated school at Agios Theodoros; the image shows the school open for a local festival, with people outside its doors.

These perceptions come in stark contrast to the fact that all MacPhail’s ‘governmental interventions’ were mainly executed through the ‘angaria’ system—an alternate term for forced labour—that authorities exploited to enhance the physical infrastructure of the islands. Evidence for the use of forced labour comes from the Colonial Office Angaria Book 1824–1828 for Kythera. The Colonial Office Angaria Book simply lists names and accounts for however many days a job took to complete and the number of mules available by month without recording the actual job. Forced labour was considered iniquitous by the local population and remembered with aversion long after it had been abandoned in 1829 and replaced by a local indirect tax system to pay for labour employed on public works (Leontsinis 1987, 347–353).

Besides public works, the period of British imperial control placed the Ionian Islands on a vital role across the Mediterranean trade routes, creating an influx of trade. Imperial investment in the development of the ports of Avlemonas and Kapsali, and the benefits of flying under an Ionian flag, contributed to an increase of Kytherian participation in maritime trade during the nineteenth century, albeit never on a scale comparable to its other Ionian neighbours. Mainly between 1826 and 1864, and to a lesser extent until WWI, Kythera became a stop in the great liners’ routes that connected central Europe with Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Levant (Kyriazopoulos and Lourantos 2014). The main lines that Kythera functioned as a stop for were Trieste-Smyrna via Ancona-Corfu-Ithaca-Zante-Kythera, and Trieste-Istanbul via Kythera-Syros-Chios. Österreichischer Lloyd (renamed Lloyds Triestino in 1919) had an agency on the island at the port of Avlemonas, while during the protectorate period several other companies, such as Mahsousse, P&O Company, Cunard, ROPIT, and Norddeutsche Lloyd, occasionally used the island as a stop. A Customs House and Austro-Hungarian consulate were also operating at the port in Avlemonas from the early nineteenth century (during the British Protectorate period and after unification with Greece). This also shows the importance of Kythera as a stop along the main shipping routes in the Mediterranean.

Thus, contemporary perceptions regarding the colonial impact on the island society are skewered towards the positive (see commentary at Kalligeros 2001). This perception is to a great extent grounded on the landmarks and great public works, as well as the connectivity that Kythera had during the protectorate and its immediate aftermath period. These factors have led to the romanticisation of the period by the locals and resulted in the appropriation of several British imperial interventions on the island, which are indeed treated as part of the local culture, history, and rooted cosmopolitanism of contemporary Kytherians (Kalligeros 2001). The present paper draws attention not towards the study of monumental or public works but towards the materiality of the everyday life on the island instead. Through the perspective offered by following the object itineraries of the gin bottles—a group of seemingly unassuming and mundane artefacts –these romanticised perceptions of imperial culture can be contextualised within everyday consumption patterns, shining fresh light on the ways colonialism in Kythera became locally credited as a period of positive change in the island’s history.

The Kythera Gin bottles: introducing the artefacts

The corpus of stoneware gin bottles taken into consideration for the purpose of this paper combines two subsets of material. The first is a group of stoneware bottles that were identified and recorded by the Australian Paliochora-Kythera Archaeological Survey (APKAS), a project conducted between 1999 and 2020 by the University of Sydney under the aegis of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens (AAIA), which investigated the rural northern part of the island (Fig. 3). The second subset of material is used as supplementary evidence and comprises vessels recorded by the Finds Stories project, an Erasmus+ KA2 funded interdisciplinary research that examines the diachronic impact of mobilities in the Western Balkans, from prehistory onwards, and involves—among others—the collaboration of researchers from the AAIA, the Archaeological Museum in Zargeb, the Cathays High School in the UK, and the University of Bristol and Cardiff Metropolitan University also in the UK.

Fig 3 A map with all survey locations of APKAS at the Northern part of kythera island.

This image shows a map of the northern half of Kythera, with all the areas of APKAS project annotated. The survey zones in the central and northern part of the island where Gin bottles were recovered are visible around the localities of Vythoulas, Aroniadika and more.

During APKAS a total of eleven fragmentary stoneware gin bottles were discovered and recorded. The stoneware bottle specimens were found in eight survey units (SU 939, 1601, 7028, 7101, 16105, 18042, 18043, 18050), with a wide distribution over the area covered by the survey. As the APKAS project followed a primarily non-collecting survey methodology based on the Chronotypes system (see Gregory 2004 and Gregory et al. 2019), only six of the gin bottle fragments were recovered from the field during the fieldwork investigations, while the presence of the remaining five was observed on site by the survey teams, without removing them from the field. The two most extensively preserved vessels that are presented in detail below and constitute the focus of the discussion were collected from the localities of Trifilianika (SU 939) and Vythoulas (SU 7028). The remaining nine specimens are in a much poorer state of preservation and originated from the localities of Ammoutses, Viglatoria, and Koupharika, in addition to Vythoulas. It is worth noting that the finds come from a rural context at a considerable distance from any habitation centre or village.

The bottle from Trifilianika (Fig. 4) is the best-preserved specimen in this corpus. It shows a rim to body profile, preserved to approximately mid-height, and is entirely missing its lower half. It has a cylindrical body and rounded shoulder, giving way to a narrow cylindrical neck, marked by a ridge around the neck-shoulder junction and equipped with a double rib halfway up. The rim is vertical, with a thickened outer lip. It is brown-glazed and the front side of the bottle bears a stamped medallion of a bell and the branding mark of BLANKENHEYM & NOLET/SCHIEDAM below. The bottle from Vythoulas (Fig. 5) presents a comparable rim to shoulder profile but in contrast to the handleless example from Trifilianika, it is equipped with a shoulder to upper body strap handle. It further lacks any ribs along its narrow neck and has a slightly incurving rim. It is yellow-glazed and does not preserve any markings on its extant surface. The remaining nine specimens of the corpus are much more fragmentary, comprising brown-glazed stoneware body sherds and one base fragment. None of them preserved stamped proprietary markings.

Fig 4 A photo and an illustration of one of the blankenheym & nolet stoneware bottles.

This image shows a photo of a stoneware gin bottle that has a stamp of the Blankenheym & Nolet distillery, based on Amsterdam Netherlands. The right side of the image shows an illustration of the same bottle.

Fig 5 The gin bottle from DU 7028.

This image shows a photo of the rim and handle of a gin bottle fragment discovered at DU 7058. The right side of the image shows an illustration of the same fragment.

An additional group of 22 stoneware gin bottles was also recorded from the island of Kythera as part of the Finds Stories research (Fig. 6). These bottles are all still in ‘use’ today and belong to individuals that reside on the island and who volunteered to contribute their vessels to be recorded by the research team by the means of an online survey, supplying additional information through an accompanying questionnaire. The questionnaire covered a short range of questions, regarding ownership of the bottles, their condition, and the general knowledge that the bottle holder have about their function, provenance, and history. All the 22 bottles covered in the survey are fully preserved and three show the same branding stamp of Blankenheym & Nolet on the upper body, similarly to the APKAS bottle from the area of Trifilianika. Most of them are brown-glazed and strap-handled, while one of them bears a different branding (OUDE GENEVER/FROSIT/S. VAN DIJK AZN./AMSTERDAM.). The latter specimen (Fig. 6a) exhibits yet a different variation of the rim to neck profile, combining a ridge on the neck-to-shoulder junction and a thickened rim, but lacking the plastic ribs halfway up the neck that the Trifilianika bottle displays. The bottles are currently part of households from all over the island and came to the possession of their present owners either through family or other personal relations or were collected from surface contexts across the island.

Fig 6 (a) Gin bottle still in use by the locals with the stamp from OUDE GENEVER/FROSIT/S. VAN DIJK AZN./AMSTERDAM. (b) A bottle collected from a local from the fields and currently in display at a Kytherian House.

The figure shows two whole stoneware gin bottles that are still in use/dispay at local houses in Kythera. The left bottle is in a really good condition and presented the stamp of OUDE GENEVER/FROSIT/S. VAN DIJK AZN./AMSTERDAM. The bottle at the right of the image has been collected from the fields, and it is not in perfect condition.

The cultural itineraries of the Kythera gin bottles

The itineraries of the bottles can be approached in a comparative and complementary way that allows the observation of points of convergence, which is warranted by similarities in terms of their formal characteristics and their contexts of discovery, but also stages of greater variation. They can be approached from three perspectives, corresponding to three main segments that their itineraries intersected with the everyday lives of people across time and space, and which can be substantiated sufficiently on the basis of the extant historical and archaeological record. These segments include the process of their manufacture, their circulation and use on Kythera at the time of British imperial rule and its immediate aftermath, and the most recent part of their itineraries in modern-day contexts, either as archaeological artefacts and subjects of research, or as privately owned possessions.

From raw material to commodities

The typological features of the gin bottles, and especially the two APKAS specimens that have received professional drawings, are a rich source of information for reconstructing the earliest stages of their cultural itineraries. They all belong to the distinct pottery class of stoneware, whose production began in central Europe as early as the end of the thirteenth c. AD (Gaimster 1997). Its major production centres were located in the so-called ‘Kannenbäckerland’ in the Lower Rhineland as well as Saxony in modern Germany, but regional production eventually spread to the Netherlands, Belgium, East and Southeast Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Stoneware was diachronically characterised by fine and fully fused fabrics that were fired in temperatures as high as 1200–1300°C. Due to being fully vitrified they exhibited very low porosity, which rendered them ideal containers for the consumption, storage, and transport of liquids. This technological feature exalted the stoneware production of central Europe to one of the most successful industries that were able to achieve a mass production and worldwide distribution in Late Medieval and early modern times.

Stoneware bottles—often alternating in bibliography with the term ‘jug’—were not really part of the early repertoire of the stoneware workshops. The shape was, however, later introduced (Askey 1981) and especially catered to the increasing demand for cheap and durable containers for mineral water from German naturally carbonated springs, whose export peeked during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same types of bottles also became widely used as containers of spirits, as is the case of all the Kytherian specimens. According to the reference classification and chronology of stoneware bottles followed by Brinkmann (1982), the two APKAs finds from Trifilianika and Vythoulas (Figs. 4–5) as well as the three Blankenheym & Nolet bottles from the Finds Stories recordings, date to the late nineteenth century. Bottles from Trifilianika and Vythoulas belong to types F and E respectively, while the S. van Dijk bottle (Fig. 6a) also falls into type E. The two types display close similarities, with a combination of a cylindrical body and rounded shoulder, and both generally appear in handled and handleless forms. Type E is slightly earlier, dating from 1850 onwards, and its simple, unribbed neck is very diagnostic. The Trifilianika bottle is slightly later. To these points, on the one hand, the ribbed neck—a feature appearing for the first time around 1870, as an addition facilitating the secure attachment of the tin capsules sealing the bottles. On the other hand, the lack of wheel-ridging on its inner surface, which is also the typical characteristic for its classification in type F, sets 1879 as a reliable terminus ante quem, since by then stoneware bottles stopped being exclusively wheel-turned.

The manufacturing process of the bottles themselves created a setting for a wide array of social interactions. Different people were involved at different stages across the chaîne opératoire, from the extraction of the clay and the acquisition of fuel for the kilns, to the organisation of the pottery workshops. The treatment of the clay, the turning, marking, glazing, and firing of the vessels necessitated the collaboration of potters in the social context of the workshop. A whole different network of interactions developed in relation to the production process of the liquid contents of the bottles, and specifically Dutch gin/genever carried by the specimens from Kythera, as indicated by the stamped vessels. An extensive range of relationships was formed or negotiated among artisans with different skills and specialisations during the procurement of raw materials (grain/yeast, juniper or later molasses), fuel, and technical equipment, the operation and maintenance of the distillery facilities, as well as the production, bottling, marking, and distribution of the final product.

The stamped mark of the producer on four of the Kytherian bottles with the Blankenheym & Nolet branding informs us about the place of production of its contents and the name of the gin manufacturer, making it possible to contextualise these interactions within the specific regional and industrial environment of Schiedam. Schiedam was a centre of the Dutch genever industry, which emerged as early as the sixteenth century, through experimentation with grain spirit distillation (Solmonson 2012). The steady supply of grains through Rotterdam and the direct access to the major Dutch port for the export of the produced commodities created favourable conditions for the emergence of profitable spirit and yeast factories. This is demonstrated by the increase in the number of distilleries operating in Schiedam, which grew exponentially during the eighteenth century, to further nearly double between the end of the eighteenth and the late nineteenth century, counting 392 distilleries by 1881 (Schmitz 1962; Bersselaar 2007, 51)—roughly around the time the Kytherian bottles were produced. For instance, the distillery owned by the Nolet family, which is one of the manufacturers noted on the producer’s marking on the bottles, was first established in 1691, and by 1867 growing demand led to the overseas expansion of their business, with the institution of a second distillery in Baltimore. Thus, it can be argued that the shipping of Blankenheym & Nolet across the Mediterranean was part of a truly international industrial and commercial network.

The proprietary branding found on the Kythera stoneware bottles additionally permits a closer insight into the relational connections that were articulated between the producer of the genever and the pottery workshop supplying the physical container (Basford 2012). As the bottles from Trifilianika and Vythoulas are not preserved in full, it is impossible to determine whether they would have originally carried indication of the manufacturer, as none of the other completely preserved recorded vessels do. Marks of production were generally positioned towards the bottom of the bottles but their presence tended to decrease in frequency in the course of the nineteenth century. Still, the individual that branded the vessels with the identity of the distiller was likely not the person responsible for filling the bottles in the first place, as the branding was applied pre-firing. The branding process can be regarded as the material expression of a relationship of trust between the distiller and the pottery manufacturer. The decision of the distiller to commission and purchase bottles for their genever from a specific workshop had a direct impact on the final product, as the quality of the container directly affected the quality of the contained drink. Bottle branding further communicated to a wide audience, including both retailers and consumers, the authenticity and quality of the contents (Basford 2012). By having the bottles marked with the company name (Blankenheym and Nolet; S. van Dijk), place of production (Schiedam; Amsterdam), and pictorial signifier (bell medallion on the Blankenheym and Nolet vessels), the distillers attempted to safeguard their product from imitations. This of course could only work if audiences were previously familiar with the visual proprietary devices used by the distiller. The stamped markings were also by the nineteenth century combined with or often even completely substituted by printed labels, which supplied the same information, albeit in a less permanent, and more cost-efficient format, and this probably explains the lack of stamped branding marks on the majority of the other bottles from the Finds Stories recordings.

Thus, before the gin stoneware bottles could reach a consumer on Kythera, or even better, before the bottles could reach the Mediterranean from Schiedam or Amsterdam, they were already embedded in an intricate chain of interactions and social dynamics involving a substantial number of specialised craftsmen, middlemen, retailers, agents, and shippers that were entangled with the bottles and their contents and contributed to their rich and layered itineraries.

Gin bottles on 19th century Kythera

A second segment of the bottles’ itineraries involves the part of the artefacts’ use and circulation in the colonial and the immediate post-colonial environment of the island of Kythera. The identification of a significant number of nineteenth century gin bottles among the APKAS material and the bottles of similar chronology still forming part of contemporary Kytherian households, are certainly not a coincidental occurrence and should be tied to consumption patterns shared across regions under British commercial control. It is in this context that the Kytherian gin bottles should be integrated, in relation to the island’s involvement in the colonial economic, political, and cultural environment. The shifts in local economy, with the more active engagement of the island in international commercial networks, and the accompanying constructive improvements to the ports of Avlemonas and Kapsali, created conditions that facilitated the importation of foreign goods that catered to the needs and changing consumption patterns of the newly formed protectorate. The latter, in combination with the popularity of gin among the British colonial elite and tendencies of emulation among locals offer an indication behind the factors that lead to the importation of Dutch gin on this remote Greek island.

The deep roots of gin consumption in Britain itself—introduced through Dutch imports—go back to the late seventeenth century and culminated to the so-called ‘Gin Craze’ of the eighteenth century that led to a series of Gin Acts, aimed at the regulation of gin production and its effects on public health (Warner 2003). The importation and consumption of distilled beverages in colonial contexts, on the other hand, is not only a matter with economic or material implications but is also closely connected with the socio-political dynamics of colonialism. The introduction and regulation of alcohol and the forging of new meanings and controlled narratives around alcohol consumption has been variously tied to ways of structuring colonial power and rooting asymmetrical relations and systems of inequality in everyday practices. From colonial North America and Africa to India, or even down to nineteenth century Sámi communities in Scandinavia, alcohol has been demonstrated to have played a pivotal role in the formation of colonial geographies, the negotiations of status and resources between colonists and indigenous populations, and the materialisation of political agendas in colonial settings (e.g. Akyeampong 1996; Quintero 2001; Fischer-Tiné 2012; Lakomäki, Kylli, and Ylimaunu 2017). From this perspective, a commodity that entered local economies through commercial networks was instrumental in the modification of cultural and social landscapes that were context-specific and became intertwined with the articulation of colonial authority and state-building. These newly introduced patterns of consumption had lasting and diverse impacts on local cultural and social trajectories. One such case that is noteworthy here, as it pertains to Dutch gin following a much different cultural itinerary than its equivalent reaching Kythera in the late nineteenth century, is that of West Africa (Bersselaar 2007), where the incorporation of Dutch gin in trade, social practices, and ritual resulted in its re-signification as a commodity of high status in local African tradition.

The discovery of the bottles over a substantial geographical horizon in the northern part of Kythera, in particular, can further be related to systematic attempts by the British to implement a decentralised political organisation on the island (Smith 2011). Unlike the previous Venetian political structure that relied heavily on Chora and undermined social stability, this decentralisation, no matter how superficial, promoted the strengthening of administration in rural areas. This in turn resulted in a relative restructuring of the rural landscape and the evolution of the local agricultural economy. In the case of Kythera, another possibility that should be considered is that a percentage of these bottles may have arrived on the island empty. Hence, it was not necessarily the gin that made it to the island but the bottles, as part of the cargo on ships that used Kythera as a stopping place. It is unlikely that there was a big market for gin on the island, and the consumption of imported spirits was mainly an upper-class trend (certainly among wealthy individuals and notables with international connections). The gin bottles, or some of them, may have arrived on Kythera empty after the gin had been consumed on the ships and they were subsequently discarded, or perhaps even sold. Another factor worth considering in this discussion is the stability and safety of navigating through the eastern Mediterranean and around Kythera, which until the early nineteenth century, when the British naval fleet began its attempts at curtailing piracy, especially in areas under their control, like the Ionian Islands, were notoriously dangerous for commercial trade (Prineas 2009; Pratt 1982). By securing these nodal trade routes, Kythera resumed an unprecedented importance as a natural stopping place between east and west, with Avlemonas and Kapsali the main ports of entry to the island. However, even though the southern straits were mostly secure, the straits between the southern Peloponnese (Ottoman occupied Lakonia and control of the Mani by local pirate families) and the northern part of Kythera were somewhat of a problematic territory, with piracy and smuggling of goods into the island still posing a problem for the island’s authorities well into the later part of the nineteenth century (Mylonakis 2021). One should, therefore, also consider the possibility that the presence of many gin bottles found in the northern part of the island may have resulted from such unauthorized para-activities. The significance of an underclass of pirates and smugglers should be therefore considered within the context of a broader colonial setting alongside legitimate traders and world travellers with a just as equal an impact, especially on an island like Kythera.

Important historic events in the social trajectory of Gin, such as the introduction of tonic water to gin in 1870s for initially medicinal purposes (see Solmonson 2012) may not be directly associated with the presence of stoneware bottles in Kythera. The island in the 1870s is now part of Greece, and more traditional drinks such as wine or raki becoming the norm. However and as we mentioned earlier, the island is still cosmopolitan linked with Egypt, Smyrna, Istanbul, Trieste, and being a trade stop to the East. There is an elite in the island associated with the trade networks that may welcome the new mixes and drinks for both social or medicinal purposes. Since this paper though focuses on data from the island’s north, away then form the cosmopolitan elite that resides at the island’s capital in the South and the port of Avlemonas in the East, we really cannot support a theory that suggests any connections between the surge of gin consumption for medicinal purposes with the presence of stoneware bottles on the island.

As such, the stoneware bottles from Kythera were embedded in complex social dynamics that manifested themselves in patterns of consumption of material culture. Even though their original owners and users will remain unknown, for the containers arriving full, then their consumption was interlinked with ways of maintaining and negotiating identities in the colony, patterns that would have outlasted the end of the protectorate. If they catered to a local, Greek demand, they supplied a means of emulation and reproduction of the imperial alcohol drinking culture and functioned as physical attestations to their owners’ status that allowed them to partake in it. For the bottles arrived on the island empty of their original contents, then their value as storage containers for wine or other spirits (like the local raki) should not be underestimated. Stoneware bottles, with their non-porous, high-quality fabrics, would have made a far better choice of container than what was available locally. Both full or empty the presence of the stoneware liquor bottles on Kythera, and their introduction to the local society was a direct output of the colonial presence on the island.

The bottles now: mobile even when static

The latest stage of the bottles’ itineraries is the one that can be tracked in closest detail and allows for the documentation of wider variation in the bottles’ itineraries. An initial point of divergence in that respect is obvious between the two subsets of APKAS and Finds Stories recordings. The former specimens were removed from circulation between their discard and their re-discovery by the fieldwork campaigns, whereas the latter regardless of if they went through periods of discard or not, became at different points in time—and continue to be—part of Kytherian household assemblages.

In the former case, the bottles recovered by the APKAS fieldwork in northern Kythera in the early 2000s transformed from being in a state of discard, lacking active relational connections, to being classified as archaeological artefacts. We can securely argue that they went through prolonged periods of inactivity and either in the course of these periods or prior to that they were subjected to fragmentation, resulting in their current state of preservation. This was not, however, a definitive end to their journey, as indicated by their archaeological (re)discovery by the systematic investigation conducted by the survey teams. The two stoneware bottles were thus given a new contextual load, as part of a new meshwork of human and object interactions. They were grouped with the other collected finds from their respective survey units, and alongside these finds they were subsequently transferred to the storeroom of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Piraeus and Islands in the village of Mylopotamos on Kythera, where they were initially processed by specialists, were entered in the project’s database and were stored away for nearly 15 years. Their study resumed in 2020, during a brief campaign that primarily targeted the study and publication of the prehistoric finds from the survey. Research methodological parameters and actions of individual researchers and team members were therefore responsible for retrieving the bottles from their places of discard, imbuing them with new meaning as subjects worthy of analysis, and embedding them within a new context of social interaction, that of an academic setting, within the sphere of post-colonial discourse.

A very different course can be tracked in relation to the 22 specimens recorded through the Finds Stories digital survey. These bottles either remained in the possession of Kytherians over generations or they were rediscovered, after an undefined phase of discard, and were collected anew from surface locations all over the island, to be included in local assemblages. Specifically, twelve out of the 22 bottles were given to their current owners as heirlooms or were passed down by family members, whereas seven were reported as personally collected form the fields (Fig. 7A). Two were given as gifts to new business owners. We can thus positively surmise that across the different cases, human actors for a range of reasons and under diverse circumstances deemed the bottles worth passing down to relatives, gifting to others, or significant enough to actively engage with in a field, remove them from their place of metaphorical death, and position them into a new context.

Fig 7 (a) A graph showing how the bottle owners that have been surveyed by the Finds Stories team, have acquired their bottles. (b) Reasons for the bottles being kept by the locals today. Each box corresponds to one participant.

The figure shows two graphs that demonstrated the results of the Finds Stories surveys to local owners of stoneware gin bottles. The graphs demonstrate the results in colour boxes, where each box corresponds to one participant in the survey. The graph at the top demonstrates ownership with most of participants claim that have got their bottles through heirloom. The bottom graph, shows reasons for the bottles being still in use with most of the participants claiming that they are using the bottles for decorative purposes.

As to the factors behind the individual choices that defined these itineraries, the short interview questions, answered by the current bottle owners, provides a closer insight. Those owning specimens with intergenerational itineraries within the same family indicate how the objects became intertwined with their family history, long after the original function of the bottles became irrelevant. One of the participants in the survey described how the bottle originally belonged to his father, who grew up in the late 1800s. Even though he did not know what the bottle was initially used for, he specified that his father used the vessel for carrying and serving wine. In that particular case, the object was embedded in a network of interactions within the family unit and was also assigned a new use, as a wine container. It was also given a new name, ‘tserve’, as memorised by the owner. Its colonial associations were not forgotten, but it was re-integrated in local alcohol consumption patterns and remained appreciated for its utilitarian character and distinctive typological and morphological style. There is thus a strong likelihood that this bottle outlived colonial times, and more significantly it was repurposed to hold a drink deeply rooted in local tradition as opposed to imported and expensive gin. In our survey we can see several people understand the stoneware gin bottles as wine bottles, something that makes us assume that the story that we have captured from this one bottle is not unique. Unfortunately, since this survey was contacted online, we have very little anecdotal information and further family stories about these bottles, but we see this survey as an opportunity for further anthropological research on the island.

With the progress of time the meanings bestowed on the bottles and their use in every day practices did not persist and were reformed to fit new domestic functions. Interestingly, 55% of the individuals that took the online questionnaire assumed that the objects initially contained wine, while the rest gave a variety of answers, from whisky to water, and only three identified that they were originally used for holding gin. This does not only indicate the disconnection of the bottles from gin consumption in collective perceptions, but also illustrates the short-lived character of the colonial cultural construct surrounding the consumption of alcoholic beverages, which never came to supplant local habits. By the time the bottles reached their current owners their material properties were seen in a completely new light, as 14 of the 22 bottles which are currently in active use were reported to function as decorative items, placed in visible parts of the households (Fig. 7B). While the other nine vessels are stored away and not actively engaged with in daily life, they do not entirely lack relational connections, as their owners continue to deem them valuable enough not to dispose of.

Looking more closely into the reasons why value is ascribed to the bottles in the present, it becomes clear that their functionality, in terms of content, was not the highest ranking among them. Only one individual specified that they kept the bottle for practical purposes—as a flower vase. Most individuals (17 out of 22) stated that they valued the bottles for both their aesthetic attributes and their historical/ethnographic importance. The formal characteristics of the artefacts, with their distinct foreign style that does not require specialised knowledge to be macroscopically identified, as well as the undeniable age of the bottles themselves contributed to their ascribed value and status as objects of historical significance. This is supported by the fact 77% of all bottle owners, correctly dated the manufacture of the objects to the nineteenth century, while the remaining 23% suggested that the vessels were made during the course of the twentieth century. With regards to the place of the bottles’ manufacture, the owners provided a variety of answers. Nevertheless, two thirds of them were confident of their non-local provenance. Only five suggested correctly an origin from Europe, with the rest opting for an Italian, British, American, or Australian provenance, while less than a third of the individuals posited that bottles were made in Kythera. Notably, the individuals that personally recovered the vessels from the fields were in almost all cases knowledgeable of their actual place of manufacture and the chronology, showing their value as collectors’ items.

The answers to the online questionnaire demonstrate that in the latest segment of the bottles’ itineraries, the link to colonial narratives was to a great extent severed and forgotten. The vessels were re-conceptualised and integrated in new domestic sets of relations, associated with the ways their owners’ imagined connections to the past, which sometimes corresponded to factual historic evidence, but most of the time did not. The cross-cultural connections of the objects, albeit largely acknowledged, were muddled by the cases of mobility the Kytherian communities were diachronically involved in, from the Venetian expansion and British imperialism to modern transnational experiences surrounding the late nineteenth and twentieth c. migratory waves towards America and Australia. Either actively displayed or static, stored away in non-visible parts of the households, the meanings of the bottles continue to be in a state of motion, re-defined through the negotiation of the identities of their owners and their personal or collective connections to heritage.

Concluding remarks

The examination of the Kythera stoneware gin bottles has presented the opportunity to approach one aspect of the materiality of colonial and post-colonial interactions on the island. The articulation of these relationships through the introduction of new consumption patterns was reflected in the daily material practices of local communities, notwithstanding their geographical distance from the centre of the British protectorate. The cultural itineraries of the bottles outlined the contextual, relational, and conceptual trajectories the objects followed across time and space, as their paths overlapped with the literal or metaphorical lives of people, institutions, other material artefacts or ideas. The stoneware gin bottles proved to have been in a constant state of motion regardless of if spatial movement was involved or not, or if along the passage of time they went through periods of inaction and disuse. While the manufacturing process entangled them with the lives and identities of the individuals that formed part of the production and distribution of the objects and their contents, their circulation and consumption was tied to the British imperial economy and the interplay between alcohol drinking and the manipulation of cultural space by the colonial power.

As a colonially introduced commodity, the spirit and its stoneware containers were imbued with cultural meanings that were intertwined with the forging of new social transactions and definitions of status in daily practices within the colonial environment of the protectorate. Even though a lasting cultural polarity between gin and more localised drinks cannot be observed on Kythera, the material impact, as documented by the vessels still found in local domestic assemblages, is well-manifested but has been reframed and entangled with hybridised notions of personal and group identification. The modern-day individual narratives, as they emerged from the exploration of the itineraries of the bottles, bespeak the fluidity of local identities that draw from various cultural sources, linked to the diachronic cross-cultural interactions and processes of interregional and long-distance mobility the island communities were and continue to be engaged in, and which have shaped collective perceptions of heritage.

The information supplied by the present owners of the bottles on Kythera who participated in our research refutes what at first glance appeared as a reasonable hypothesis. The collection and appreciation of the stoneware containers does not fall consistently into romanticised conceptualisations of British colonial interventions on the island, pointed out in local historiography in relation to communal architecture. The individuals did not express homogenous and uniform ways they connected to the objects, which varied from aesthetic appreciation of their distinct material attributes, ties to family history, and links to heritage, even though the latter were not always precise and grounded in historical knowledge. Through the itineraries of these objects, we instead gain an insight into the rooted cosmopolitanism of the local community. Cultural identification was shaped, consciously or not, through ever-changing interactions with cultural sources that themselves did not have clear-cut boundaries. In this process the materiality of British imperialism on the island, as illustrated by the meanings assigned across time to the stoneware gin bottles, was variously re-conceptualised, re-interpreted, and integrated in local social practice in diverse ways, much like the collective beliefs and identities of their Kytherians owners that changed and shifted gradually, across several generations.

Author contributions

CM: Writing Original Draft, Investigation. LTG: Manuscript editing, supervision, resources, APKAS project director. CLF: Manuscript Editing, Investigation, Visualisations. PKT: Conceptualisation, Writing Original Draft, Investigation, Resources, Visualisation, Funding Acquisition, Finds Stories Primary Investigator.

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank the Nicholas Anthony Aroney Trust who supported the latest APKAS seasons and the analytical work on the material. Authors would like to thank Nikos Kominos of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Piraeus for arranging access to the Archaeology stores on Kythera, as well Drs S. Chyssoulaki and K. Psaraki for all the support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Research on the cultural biographies of the stoneware bottles have been supported by the EU Erasmus + KA2 grant 2020-1-UK01-KA201-079065 as part of the Finds Stories project.