"DIG, DAMMIT! I'M PAYING YOU BY THE HOUR!"
Posted on 05/13/2005 9:18:29 AM PDT by Loyalist
HALIFAX – Three archeologists are digging through what is likely the remains of a rich man’s privy. Developers want to build a $20-million hotel and residential development beside Halifax’s Brewery Market. But provincial law dictates that scientists armed with trowels and hoes get to comb the site first, looking for artifacts of historical significance.
Yesterday the cultural detectives were concentrating on the brick foundation of what they suspect was once a large outhouse.
“There’s no unpleasant surprises,” said Stephen Davis, the Saint Mary’s University archeologist leading the dig.
Among buckets of ash from coal-fired furnaces that filled the old outhouse, archeologists are finding bottles and plates.
“There’s a lot of kids’ stuff in there,” Davis said. “We found two little porcelain dollheads, a tiny little tea pot and a little cup.”
They’ve even uncovered broken tubes of smelling salts.
“It was a fairly common thing for a woman in Victorian times to carry these around,” he said. “When they swoon from the tightness of their corsets, they could break one of these things and that would bring them around.”
Beef and chicken bones tossed in the privy shows locals liked their meat.
“By 1860, this area started getting sewers and indoor plumbing, so what they did with the old outhouses was they just filled them with garbage, because there wasn’t regular garbage collection,” Davis said.
For the past week, a backhoe operator has been delicately peeling the asphalt and gravel off land bounded by Hollis, Salter and Lower Water streets. When Halifax was founded in 1749, this area was outside the fence of sharp wooden posts that surrounded the city.
“This was a suburb,” Davis said. “You were on your own out here.”
The grey foundations of a house torn down about half a century ago can be seen on the western edge of the property.
“We’re guessing — we’ll know better in a week or two — that it is an 18th-century home,” Davis said. “We know by the 1780s, this whole area was occupied.”
The site once contained about a dozen buildings, including homes and carriage houses for horses. Along Lower Water, you could find a candle- and soap-making shop, what experts suspect was a windmill and The Double Eagle, the city’s first tavern, where John Shippey started serving booze 256 years ago.
“He got the first licence to brew beer in Halifax,” Davis said.
Signs warn it’s illegal for people to remove artifacts from the site without a permit.
“They will be prosecuted,” Davis said. “The police are watching this place.”
Archeologists are pretty brave - even for better historical information I'd have a hard time rummaging through an old outhouse!
Nuthin' beats a good midden!
"DIG, DAMMIT! I'M PAYING YOU BY THE HOUR!"
Archaeology has changed a bit...
That's a pretty wierd diet!
Pingawinga
On Tuesday I hepled with filming a ducumentary at the Hayes Presidential Library in Fremont, OH. These is a temporary exhibit there of Dr. Bush's archeological dig on Johnson's Island (Sandusky Bay) at the site of a Civil War Union prison which held Confederate officers. The main focus of the dig are the latrines. Boy, what a treasure trove they are turning out be be for understanding the history of this prison. I specifically asked if the soil still smelled and was told, "No." After a while worms and other biological processes break up the human waste and the untrained eye would most likely just think these sites were ordinary rich soil.
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I'm glad the police are guarding the place. I'd hate for someone to sneak a turd out.
ah, I'm feeling much happier for the archaeologists now! Thanks for the info.
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