Cathy mentioned laudries.  I think the two might be related.  An all male
hotel, like military posts, could have laundresses to service the borders.
So, unless you can eliminate that possibility, the buttons might just be a
better indicator for the laundry service rather than a direct indicator of
the men.

Linda Derry, Director
Old Cahawba - AHC
719 Tremont St.
Selma, AL 36701 - 5446
ph. 334/875-2529 / email: [log in to unmask]


> -----Original Message-----
> From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Cathy
> Spude
> Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 11:04 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: buttons in hotels
>
>
> On 3/9/02, Ron May asked:
>
> Has anyone excavated around hotels that were occupied by bachelor working
> class men and found a  high number of shirt buttons? I have heard the
> hypothesis that single men would not have salvaged the buttons of worn out
> shirts.
>
> Yeh, I think I might have some indirect evidence that sort of
> supports that
> hypothesis, although I didn't do the digging.
>
> I didn't exactly look at buttons as a specific type in my
> dissertation, but
> I did have a class of artifacts I called "Generic Personal Items" that was
> mostly composed of buttons. I compared Hotels, Family Households,
> Transient
> Male Households, Saloons, Brothels, and Military Sites and worked out a
> methodology for estimating the mix of each in a city dump.
>
> I used four hotels from four different towns in the Rocky Mountain west to
> build the hotel model. They all catered mostly to men.
>
> Other than the transient males, the hotels had the highest percentage of
> generic personal items. (Transient males = 43.4%, hotels =
> 31.8%). No other
> assemblage came even close.  The next largest group was the Military Sites
> with 13.3% generic personal items. (I did not look at architectural
> artifacts, so all of these percentages do not include window glass, nails,
> etc.). Obviously, even the Military Sites were dominated by males.
>
> So yeh, MAYBE lost buttons and men have something to do with each other?
>
> I didn't have enough comparative data to look at laundries. It would have
> been another interesting data set.
>
>
> Cathy Spude
> [log in to unmask]
> (she who always writes too long a message)
>