One must not overlook the possibility that shirt buttons reached
privies on pieces of shirt. The life cycles of buttons are fairly
predictable.

Back in the "old days," rags were recycled into paper mills. There
was a good market for rags, which would be transported to the paper
mills, relieved of their buttons, and beaten into pulp. Behind any
paper mill would be a pile of buttons, which I believe the button
collectors are likely to have discovered. In the "old days," frugal
housewives would scan the button banks, rather than buy new buttons.

But there is another button story.

Before the advent of toilet tissue, or of Sears catalogues, personal
hygiene involved small rags. If one lived some distance from the rag
pickers, such as a rural location, old shirts might serve a useful
purpose. On a medieval priory site, I recall seeing many little
pieces of cloth, some with threads of precious metal embroidery.

On rural plowed sites, it's not unusual to find the occasional loose
button, which suggest purely accidental losses by farm workers. I've
often wondered at the relatively large numbers of apparently randomly
lost buttons
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