Jim Gibb wrote:
>holes in the floors of a 1920 cottage, the holes designed as trash traps,
>and the resulting trash distribution signature

and I want to share some more first-hand observational anecdotal evidence:

The house I grew up in had a crawl space under the kitchen, and one day
when I was but a wee lad (I wouldn't fit under there now) I was crawling
around in there looking for goodies.  I came up with some old beer bottles,
a few coins that my metal detector detected, and then I hit the
jackpot.  Along one edge of the kitchen, right along side the big open
cistern, I found a large dusty heap of the most unappetizing pile of
desiccated detritus that you could ever imagine - all caked with
grease.  It contained chicken bones, hair pins, marbles, broken thermometer
parts (and I am sure mercury), glass and shell buttons, hair
(dog/cat/human), several toothbrushes, and all sorts of other disgusting
goodies.  Based on the materials within I figure that it all dated about
the early 20th century, which corresponded to a time when the house was
occupied by several lazy generations of the original builder.

Not long after the original builders' great granddaughter stopped by for a
visit and gave a full tour of the house, pointing out where the various
favorite furniture was, talking about how the window sill in the mud room
was beat up because they hauled buckets of water in through the window from
the well just outside, etc.  At the spot directly over the heap of garbage
in the crawl space she noted the location of the built-in dry sink, and
said that next to it there was a small hole in the floor through which they
would scrape all the scum and bones!  Soon after I went back down and sure
enough, there was a hole that had been patched up with plywood by my
parents in the early 1950s!

I hope they had stopped using the cistern by the time they started scraping
all the scraps into the crawl space!

         Dan W.