House and garden archaeology

 We live in an old wooden house, the core of which probably dates to the 1880's.

Exactly when I'm not sure, but like all wooden houses it has been extended and changed over the years, and while the front of the house looks authentic (but isn't, for example our front door and the Victorian etched glass in the door case dates to 1860 and came from a completely different house) the rear of the house most definitely is not, with multiple extensions over the years, most recently by ourselves in 2016.

I could, I suppose, research the date the house was originally built, but certainly, in 1856, while the block had been surveyed when the town was laid out, the town plan does not show a house on the block,

I've been told that at one time our block formed part of an orchard, and that the brewery sometimes stabled dray horses on it.

Certainly I've found an old horseshoe and a broken set of nineteenth century farriers' pliers, so perhaps there's some truth in the story.

In the course of gardening I've turned up old ceramic electrical fittings, the neck of a nineteenth century bottle, an old flat iron, a couple of 1920's medicine bottles, and a lot of broken glass, mostly from nineteenth and early twentieth century beer bottles.

So turning up bits and pieces isn't that unusual.

Today's finds consisted of a little glass object that looked a little like a glass chocolate button, and what at first sight  looked like the base of a nineteenth century medicine bottle, except that

the glass is very clear and transparent and lacks the thickness and also the little bubbles and inclusions typically found in nineteenth century glass. My guess is that it's a bit of a relatively modern, say post war, bottle that was made in the style of an earlier bottle.

The other find is a little more interesting, a little glass object around 15mm in diameter and shaped a little like a chocolate button

The glass is almost certainly nineteenth century with a greenish hue and little air bubbles trapped in it

My guess is that it is a skirt weight from the hem of a woman's dress in the nineteenth century.

Skirt weights were sewn into the hems of skirts and dresses to stop them blowing about and to help them hang properly.

Unfortunately, while the internet provides plenty of examples of metal nineteenth century hem weights, I've been unable to turn up any images of glass hem weights.