These two comments in yesterday's debate deserve further comment:

----
>The real question here appears to be what happens to the stuff after the
>privy is filled. There are excellent indications of nightsoil spreading on
>fields in European contexts, but was this commonly done in the Americas?
----
>From what I've heard, it must first be "fermented" otherwise the stuff
>can transmit >diseases so what's the early history of sewerage treatment
>before the germ theory of >disease apart from emptying it all into the
>nearest stream?
----

The nightsoil issue has been covered in several published articles, notably
in Historical Archaeology. We certainly have not been reticent about it, as
some have suggested.

Yes, in urban commercial operations, nightsoil was kept and fermented. In
the country, where there was no privy, nightsoil probably went on the
ground. Remember that rural privies were strictly for the upper crust.
Everybody else either squatted over a chamber pot or went in the woods. I
suggest that the chamber pot probably was just dumped into the yard in the
morning.

Manuring fields with nightsoil and other farmyard waste (hereabouts at
least) is a nineteeth century practice.

There is contemporary documentation for a "surface privy" that overlapped
the chicken yard. Chickens are as good as hogs for that purpose.

If the nightsoil was dumped onto the ground from a chamber pot, it would
not include much in the way of artifactual material, and the only trace
would be chemical, which is part of the reason every rural site shoud be
profiled for soil chemistry.

Don't apply modern sensibilities to interpretation. Cities stank.
Everything stank by our standards. Cemeteries stank. The vented privy, with
a pipe from the vault to the roof, was a twentieth-century innovation in
most localities (called a "WPA john" hereabouts). If you have ever used an
unvented privy, you know what a technological wonder it was.

A "miasma," thought to cause disease, was far more than just a bad smell.

And no, we don't like to talk about how our ancestors stank.




  Every archaeologist and historian can list the
  worst in their professions. We all agree that     _(____)_
  the worst incompetents share 3 attributes:       /        |
  1. They tend to have fresh ideas;         _===__/   Baby  ||
  2. They can write coherent prose;      o   ___       ___  ||
  3. They are not in the room.            ||/ . \_____/ . \_|
  ________________________________________ _ \_/_______\_/_____
  Ned Heite, Camden, DE  http://home.dmv.com/~eheite/index.html