The bottle-filled privy illustrates one of the differences between historic
and prehistoric archaeology. Archaeologists digging a prehistoric site
cannot  distinguish a single individual, or a single household, in most
cases.
 
So prehistorians are forced to deal with even small groups of people in the
aggregate. The anthropological approach, looking at people in groups, is
perfectly valid on prehistoric sites. Dig a few dozen tests at random, and
you may be able to construct a valid picture of the community.
 
Historic sites are very different. A single deposit may represent a single
individual, or at most a single household, during a very short time period.
You can't extrapolate a whole community from tests in a single yard, or
from a few.  In fact, we are almost always dealing with individuals, about
whom we reconstruct whole biographies.
 
Any historical archaeologist knows that a single privy deposit reflects
only the single household that created it, and that every household is
different. By intensively studying the individual site, it may be possible
to extrapolate certain statements about the community.
 
Working from the evidence of a single site, a skilled practitioner can draw
conclusions and extrapolate them onto a community without going too far out
on a limb. Bill Adams and Skip Stewart-Abernathy are masters of the
technique, and both are skilled at extrapolating, but only after they first
fully understand the individual site in its peculiar historical and ethnic
context.
 
Simply finding a privy full of medicine bottles proves nothing, except that
the privy was full of glass. Without knowing the context, and the
circumstances surrounding the privy filling, we can't extrapolate anything.
We certainly can't say something about the ethnic group that "dominated"
the neighborhood, or the drinking habits of a whole nation.
 
 
 
All about Iceland:        http://www.dmv.com/~iceland-----------
Research and Land Rovers: http://home.dmv.com/~eheite/index.html
 
_________                There once was a Rover named Baby
|  Baby  \               Whose starting was sometimes a "maybe."
|the Land \_===__        So I filled up her tank,
|  ___Rover   ___|       and twisted her crank,
|_/   \______/   ||      and drove off to see how the day'd be!
___\_/________\_/_____                     ---- Ned the Horrible
Ned Heite  Camden, DE