A belief in witches and witchcraft were common in Europe through the early 1700s. Witch bottles–small containers filled with personal items, sealed, and buried–are one way this belief appears in the archaeological record. Where there are witch bottles, there were people who believed in witches. The buried bottle was supposed to absorb a spell, tormenting the witch who cast the spell, and preventing the spell from harming whoever buried the bottle. When witch bottles are found today they are almost always broken or empty. But in Greenwich, England, in 2004, workers found a rare, unopened example, a stoneware bellarmine jar. They heard rattling and splashing inside, so something was definitely inside.
X-rays revealed pins and nails stuck in the jar’s neck (it had been buried upside-down). Then a CT scan showed that the witch’s bottle was about half-filled with liquid – confirming the splashing. Using a long needle, scientists penetrated the cork and removed some of the liquid for analyses. Using modern witchcraft, proton nuclear magnetic resonance and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, they determined the smelly answer: urine.
When the bottle was emptied to inventory the pins and nails, the contents were only slightly less gross than human pee. Inside were 12 iron nails (one of which was driven through a leather heart), 8 brass pins, brimstone, clumps of hair, 10 manicured fingernail clippings, and a little clot of what looked like bellybutton lint. Further tests showed that the witch bottle was probably filled and buried sometime in the 1600s.
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