Any of you who've dug on European urban medieval
sites will know that the most common feature type
is the privy, ranging from small pits to elaborate
square/rectangular, plank lined affairs up to 5'
deep. A site I dug on in Peterborough had about
3300 estimated pits in the backyard. Of course, it
was one of those top 2% townhouses by the
cathedral precincts a bit bigger than normal. When
you've seen a backyard which is a series of
hundreds of intercutting cess pits, trash pits and
wells it is abundantly clear that although people
may have lived cheek by jowel, they hadn't
rediscovered the benefits of sewer systems yet.
The largest cesspit I've heard of was a Bishop's
Deer Park hunting lodge converted from a church
which had an internal cesspit about 20 x 10 x 10
ft. Try a 1934 article entitled Latrines and
Cesspools in Medieval London by Ernest L. Sabine
in Volume 9 of the Speculum to see the wide range
of activities people got up to to dispose of human
and animal waste. During one of the plague
outbreaks the gong fermers (sic) went on strike
from cesspit cleaning and became the highest paid
manual laborers in England! Early collective
bargaining?

Geophysical surveys around Medieval towns show a
measle dot pattern of ferrous objects from
night-soil deposition into the surrounding fields.
Assuming that the colonies are doing the same
thing, the box might be a communal collective
device for spreading nightsoil. What's the
archaeological record of what happens after the
chamber pit is emptied? Has anyone removed topsoil
from around a slave quarters area versus over just
the house and a little more to see what sorts of
communal structures might exist?

Alexandria Archaeology had a magnificent slide of
what happens when a cesspit is filled and the
contents allowed to migrate. Showed a black
"cloud" centered on the former well which spread
in at least a 50' radius from the cesspit and
contaminated another well. Just showed about 1500
years of bad urban sanitation pratice by the
Europeans and their colonies.

Lyle