Welcome, Rob, to HistArch.
I think the most important point that you have raised is that of a socially heterogeneous household that includes non-family members whose motivations may differ from the owners and, thereby, influence a variety of practices, including discard.

Mark Leone and colleagues at the University of Maryland have explored this issue in connection with ritual practices of enslaved Africans in elite Colonial households. Other investigators have addressed concealment, as some recent postings to this list serve demonstrate.

Household heterogeneity and power relations should inform our interpretations of these sub-floor deposits. We are looking not just at some means of domestic trash removal--means that may be idiosyncratic or expression sof some broader patterns--but at evidence of structuring relations within the household. Theft of wine and food by servants or slaves, regardless of if or how they justified their actions, and clandestine discard of the resulting trash, has some merit for explaining the basement pit at Melwood Mansion. My difficulty--and I admittedly haven't invested much brain-time on it--is in determining what kinds of data I might consider in supporting or rejecting the hypothesis.

Jim Gibb
Annapolis, Maryland  USA

----- Original Message -----
From: Rob Burrett
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 8:32 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: sub-floor deposits

I agree that the digging of the cellar was not the original intension but after the  
initial plan has been forgotten - didn't work, flooded, new disinterested
occupiers, even abandonment, then it takes on a new role for hidden garbage
where simple laziness is often responsible for "concealment" - nothing religious, ritual or anything like that.  We might also have to remember to ask if the person responsible for the deposition was the same as the homeowner - it's one of those subtleties of
the "servant" society.  In addition we are blessed today with the luck of having someone paid  
to remove this unwanted material from our homes (well not always working in the  
crumbling Zimbabwean economy) but what of earlier, less "fortunate" times?  What about garbage "hidden" down
wells and pit toilets?  Is there some social significance to this, other than the former often occurs after its decline from use and it is just the easiest option?  I am just very sceptical about some archaeological interpretations that extend the evidence too far.

However your dense layer of material does indeed sound like subsurface
preparation.  I will have one such layer associated with the 1902 kitchen of the mission station with which I am working.   

Yet at the same time just to contradict myself-imposed scepticism. I have a small cluster
of silver florins that was concealed in the garbage pit out at the back of the old homestead.  But no ritual here and I suspect it was an African servant hiding his savings or illicit takings.  If
the former it would have been to hide it from his fellow servants as "share and share alike" is the basis of much of traditional Shona
(indigenous) life.  Or if the latter it was a good place as colonial master was
very unlikely to lower him/herself to look in this location.  By why was it then forgotten by the person? Doubt we will ever be able to answer that one.

Anyway enough for now.  I have only just joined the group and am finding it MOST interesting as I have few other academics with which to discuss such matters here in Zimbabwe.  More modern colonial archaeology is just not PC.

Rob Burrett
Harare

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Gibb" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2004 4:49 PM
Subject: Re: sub-floor deposits


Fellow HistARCHers:
I can't imagine someone going through the trouble of digging a pit in a
cellar to discard trash (which is what I found at the Melwood Mansion site
in Maryland) rather than walking up the stairs an heaving it wherever the
household typically discarded trash. I can imagine some rubbish accumulating
in a storage area or other, relatively isolated room. (Actually, no
imagination involved...just a quick trip to my basement or attic.) But the
bits of spent fuel, bones, oyster shell, vessel sherds, etc., look too much
like typical midden material in many cases. In Annapolis, Maryland, a local
avocational archaeologist excavated a large quantity of domestic debris,
including nearly two dozen coins, from approximately 100 square feet beneath
the brick floor (itself covered with several inches of sand and debris) of
an extant house. What was this highly concentrated mass of material,
including many fish bones and oyster shells, doing beneath an occupied
house. I suspect it was composted trash fill used to partially fill the
cellar and provide a base for the brick paving. The motivation might have
been constant seepage and flooding.

Laziness might explain some behavior...I might count myself an expert on the
subject, maybe later...but I doubt it could account for the recovery of a
great deal of what must have been rotting garbage from occupied prehistoric
and historic houses. Sometimes we are looking at the neighbors' trash,
deposited after abandonment, sometimes the occupying household's use of
composted trash as fill. But sometimes there is something else going on, and
that something else...be it concealment or ritual or some as yet
unidentified behavior...may prove very interesting.

Jim Gibb
Annapolis, Maryland  USA