If the process requires that the bulletin be made "obsolete," that's obviously not the way we would want to go. Nothing was made obsolete on that bulletin except a slight change in one word, which changes none of its overall conclusion.
Since you have aptly raised the issue of Occam's razor, it's worth summarizing, for those who have not been following every word of the discussion closely, what entities we must multiply to entertain some of the possibilities discussed, and why, Ric, you're right on target in framing the discussion this way.
For the bottle to be something other than 1933 Campana Italian Balm and other than something belonging to the castaway, some combination of the following must be true:
1) The date code must be in error, a period should have been placed after the 3, the bottle actually is from 1943 AND a better spectral match must exist for Skat than for Campana Italian Balm. (Note that Skat did not exist in 1933, and so for the bottle to be Skat, 2 entities must be "multiplied beyond necessity.")
2) The date code is correct and a Coast Guardsmen brought 1933 Campana Italian Balm to the Seven Site. Judging by the ads I have seen and the radio programs I have heard from the 1940s with Campana ads targeting women, this seems unlikely from a socio-cultural standpoint, notwithstanding the exceptions noted. Life Magazine and the First Nighter radio program, which both spoke of the product as an ideal way to attract men, had a combined audience share of the majority of Americans living in the 1940s.
3) The date code must be in error and a Coast Guardsman brought 1943 Campana Italian Balm to the Seven Site. This option looks to be nearly impossible. Ads I've seen from the Sears Catalogs show that by 1943, the bottle style for Campana had changed to a rounded side, rather than the straight side seen in the artifact. See attached file from the Spring 1943 Sears Catalog (notice the lovely hands).
It should be emphasized that no one is saying the above is impossible. We are, I believe, saying that the most obvious answer to this exhaustively researched (and I know because I did exhaustively research it) question is the one most obviously before us:
The bottle is most likely from 1933 and contained Campana Italian Balm, the most popular hand lotion of the era, marketed mainly to women.
(Even having said all this, I find nothing wrong with entertaining the possibilities. We must remember, however, that contextually, alongside rouge, a compact, a mirror from a mirror compact, fragments of a compact, pre-war liniment, and possible freckle ointment, one more cosmetic item is hardly unusual - unless one considers the even larger context of the island itself, whereupon it becomes positively unusual.)
And even beyond this, lest we become too wrapped up in one artifact as the next most likely "smoking gun," we need to remember what Tom King said in his blog earlier this year:
"It’s far more common in archaeology, and more trustworthy, to base our conclusions on a pattern of clues – artifacts, faunal remains, the organization of sites, and so on – that collectively give us a plausible story, a reasonable picture of what happened in the past. I know that kind of research is hard to present in screen shots and sound bites, but that’s how we actually piece the past together. And that’s that kind of a reasonable picture we think we’re seeing come together at the Seven Site. It’s still murky, and it’s still possible we’re misperceiving it, but if we are, it’s because we’re misinterpreting the patterns of evidence, not because we’re missing some specific definitive artifact."
Joe Cerniglia
TIGHAR #3078CER