The possible privy site was discovered Monday, and diggers were attempting to open it up Tuesday to investigate.
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I wonder what this “dig” cost? Who pays for this ridiculous stuff?
And, they found broken stuff - pottery, etc. - at the bottom! Great find at the cost of quite a bit of taxpayers' money.
The Archaeologist on site is a City employee, and probably works on all sites owned by the City that are deemed historical. They are usually called in if bones are discovered, or before any construction can take place in a known historical site. Then again, they may just be digging for history, which in my opinion isn’t ridiculous. He may be working hand in hand with a college, or colleges. Archaeological digs can redefine assumed notions about various aspects of our past.
Bring in a corprologist or a scatology expert and perform diagnostic sampling.
Detection of parasitics, heavy metals, diet, and other findings might provide insight worth historical interest.
Norse digs in England, especially digs performed at human waste sights have shown that the Norse were rife with parasites.
You can learn a lot more about people in those days from their privies and trash pits than from excavating other household areas. Since they were more or less restricted to the use of just one family a privy will give an excellent chronological accounting of the family’s good times verses hard times. [*snicker*] No, seriously.
Privies often contain broken china, jewelry, buttons, coins, bottles, bones from meals, household sweepings, etc.
Broken ceramics offer a great way to date layers excavated, and its qualities along with other items found, such as bones from specific cuts of beef or pork or poultry will show whether a family was pretentious and wealthy or frugal or even very poor.
Medicine bottles tossed in will tell you what illnesses they may have suffered.
Most of these clues would have been swept up and cleaned from other locations but a privy tells all.
Some archaeologist is going to be very busy excavating modern America mega-landfills to find out how we lived. I don’t think it will reflect as well on us as what would be found in Revere’s.