Hello again.  I guess once one delurks, it's hard to be quiet.  Now that
we are on avian burials, I think we've reached a different topic in more
ways than one.  I also found an avian burial, a genuine turkey, within 4
meters of the pet dog burial I mentioned.  For reasons I am not entirely
sure of, I think the turkey was probably buried in the 19th century
underneath that kitchen we were originally looking for.  There must have
been an impenetrable barrier around the perimeter of the kitchen that
kept dogs or other animals from getting under the kitchen because the
whole crawl space was pretty much sterile.  I'm thinking the turkey
probably caught a disease.  Someone, probably a family slave or servant,
was sent under the kitchen to bury it specifically where it could not be
disturbed by a scavenging animal.  The remains were intact except that
the head had been removed prior to burial.  I couldn't figure out what
was going on until I talked to one of the volunteer crew who had grown
up on a farm.  She said nobody wanted to eat a sick animal so it was not
uncommon to kill it and bury it somewhere.  And by the way, in the
gizzard we found several "gizzard stones" used to grind up food.  A
couple of these"stones" were actually bits of whiteware and one bit even
had a spot of underglaze blue paint left.  Perhaps I should actually say
we found these gizzard stones in the approximate gizzard area of the
remains.  No, we didn't do any sort of a scratch test, or even lick them
to determine what version of refined earthenware the gizzard sherds
might be.  That's enough for pets and strange buried intact remains for
me, unless you want to hear about the horse burial I found when looking
for a cellar hole in Rehoboth, Massachusetts.  We didn't dig the whole
horse--we stopped when we found four hooves sticking up out of the
ground.  Turns out the dead horse had been dumped into the cellar hole
of an 18th century house, but not until the mid 20th century according
to the informant I finally found.  Bye.
 
Leslie C. Stewart-Abernathy
Arkansas Archeological Survey
Arkansas Tech University
Russellville, AR