Diane Dismukes wrote:

> If waste is not deposited in a Privy, how then is it disposed of? This is the question,

Privies are intermediate disposal areas of a sort. There's direct deposit into the privy and secondary deposits via chamber pots or similar.

If what Mike has is a privy, the materials have to be disposed of after their initial deposition. Agreed, pigs are excellent disposers of human waste and so apparently were dogs in some cases. It seems to me to boil down to perpetuating foul odors in a confined space as in an urban setting along with your neighbor doing the same thing until
the net effect is a miasma. That appears to be the impetus for the anti-hog legislation in urban and therefore necessarily confined spatial settings. Hoglots in rural settings aren't necessarily odiferous and in fact the pigs themselves are quite fastidious creatures.

The real question here appears to be what happens to the stuff after the privy is filled. There are excellent indications of nightsoil spreading on fields in European contexts, but was this commonly done in the Americas?

From what I've heard, it must first be "fermented" otherwise the stuff  can transmit diseases so what's the early history of sewerage treatment before the germ theory of disease apart from emptying it all into the nearest stream?

Yes, the elites had separate and sometimes quite elaborate and multi-holer outhouses. Shirley Plantation in VA has the original 18th century  bedroom adult potty chair which has a cushion on a board which lifts to avoid the problems of walking several hundred yards at night to a privy, ladies to the left, gentlement to the right.

After the privies filled, TJ at Monticellohad an elaborate tramway arrangement, Westover had large receptables and other places had other arrangements for the initial deposits to be removed, but where did it all go then?

Did anyone apart from George Washington at Mt. Vernon have a dung depository. Did that one and any of the others include human as well as animal waste?

Is the deafening silence out there because we're squeamish and don't wish to discuss such disgusting stuff in polite company or is it because there's a large data gap which Mike Trinkley has suddenly opened?


Lyle