A Biography of a Stoneware Ginger Beer Bottle: The Biucchi Brothers and the Ticinese Community in Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract

The biography of a stoneware ginger bottle stamped with the retailer mark “Buicchi Bros” is approached from four different perspectives, each of which can be read as separate texts and illuminate context and use. The first discusses the events following the object’s discovery, noting how different archaeologists played a part in its accumulating histories. Second, Basilio and Ernesto Biucchi – two second generation Ticinese (Swiss Italian) brothers – are introduced by considering their fundamental role in this bottle’s life. Third, the bottle is positioned within the arena of soft drinks consumption in late nineteenth-century London. The article concludes by bringing the past into the present by introducing the descendants of the Buicchi brothers while discussing tangibility in historical archaeology. When these different inquiries are woven together, the role that both individuality and ethnicity played in the bottle’s history is negotiated via different media: marking of the stoneware bottle with the Biucchi name, the brothers’ participation in making and selling soft drinks and the restaurant business (and those they employed).