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
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(she who always writes too long a message)