William H. Adams wrote:
 
> ...snips happen...
> As to the stench, given that for many, the people, the clothes, bedding,
> and rest of the house environment would, well, offend our modern senses a
> bit. Modern restorations like Colonial Williamsburg provide a VERY
> sanitized version of history. The first visit I had there I smelled
> flowers from the gardens, not the horse manure and decomposing household
> waste or outhouses which would have been there in colonial times. Not
> very realistic!
>
> So, the question becomes "Would someone notice a stinky bone under their
> house when they themselves had not bathed in a week?"
>
 
Bill,
 
You point up what I find to be one of those great "teaching opportunities."
There invariably comes a time during a field school when some student finally
notices that a house--even a big grand georgian plantation house--seems to be
surrounded in a veritable apron of trash, including bones. Eventually folks
want to know how it got there, and the "stink" defense arises. "They wouldn't
have thrown trash out here becuase it would stink." I then suggest that our
aversion to such smells is at least partly cultural, and I suggest that folks
try tavelling somewhere beyond the malls and suburbs to determine how folks'
tolerances for smells, trash accumulation, etc. can vary. I point out that in
the pre-Lady Bird Johnson days, our roadways were knee-deep in paper and
glass trash...a situation most of us would find intolerable today. I then
point out that our job as archaeologists is to determine what people actually
did, and that means guarding against notions of what we think they "would" or
"should" have done according to "common sense" which, after all, isn't
"common" at all.
 
Dan
--
Dan Mouer
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology
Virginia Commonwealth University
http://saturn.vcu.edu/~dmouer/homepage.htm