Well bodily functions wake up SOME of us Larry....often in the middle of
the night. To add to your list of conditions leading to privy use I offer
the following. At Jordan's Journey (ca. 1620-35), only one of the five
excavated compounds had a feature which may have been a privy. This was
the big master compound enclosed by a palisade with bastions, etc. There
was on moderately deep cylindrical pit which had some sort of structure
over it. I think of John Smith's description of guys wandering outside the
walls of Jamestown to relieve themselves and being met routinely by
Indians lurking in the woods to pick them off. This may have been
incentive enough for the massacre survivors at JP to dig a hole and put an
outhouse over it.
 
Dan Mouer
Virginia Commonwealth University
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http://saturn.vcu.edu/~dmouer/homepage.htm
 
On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Larry Mckee wrote:
 
>      I think whether or not a site will have a privy of some kind is a
> function of familiarity with and acceptance of hygiene and germ theory;
> shared ideas about privacy, cleanliness, odor tolerance, etc; and how densely
> occupied the site is.  Obviously also a topic where we need to be careful not
> to insert our own sensibilities.
>      Visitors asked about the presence/absence of privies here on this
> plantation site very frequently.  We usually give them some version of the
> above, and explain that probably for the enslaved African-Americans it was a
> matter of slop buckets in the corner (although a few ceramic chamber pots
> have come to light) or a designated spot in the yard or the nearest clump of
> trees.
>      Nothing like a little talk about bodily functions to wake up the list,
> eh?
>             Yrs,
>               Larry McKee
>