Even today there is a lot of cultural differences about going to the
toilet. I remember having to explain to a Dutch digger that it was not
OK to pee in sight of members of the public in England on a castle
excavation after an official complaint was made by outraged members of
the public. Open pissoirs for men are still common in parts of France
and especially Belgium eg on open station platforms adjacent to the old
lady collecting money from those who enter the indoor ladies. Toilets
for both sexes in these countries can still be (though increasingly
rare) just filthy holes in the ground which you have to squat over.
These are torture for many Brits but god knows what impact they have on
American tourists. It is common to see men peeing against walls and
hedges in France (In Britain this is confined to pub closing time and is
an arrestable offence.) However, double standards obviously work as I
remember reading a piece about the French being horrified by a female
Russian tourist doing the same thing on the beach at Cannes. I also
recall an account of  a toilet from an archaeological colleague  in an
otherwise spotless and modern middle class flat in North Africa which
was deep in years of accumulated human excrement- sounds like something
straight out of a anthro lecture course on symbolic purity.



In message <[log in to unmask]>,
margo davis <[log in to unmask]> writes
>Although I am a prehistorian and not an historical archaeologist and
>don't have the sources at the tips of my fingers--in Boston by the late
>1600s there were pit privies in use AND quite a lot of legislation
>governing their construction and location--everything from privy placement
>to privy linings to the construction of the structures over them. The Big
>Dig here has uncovered one privy dating to the last quarter of the 17th
>century and I remember reading quite a lot about the various sanitation
>laws governing them in the CRM reports.
>
>---------------------------
>Margo Muhl Davis
>PhD candidate
>Department of Archaeology
>Boston University

Paul Courtney
Leicester UK