I have been following this thread with interest as I have just unexpectedly
(on the afternoon of the last day of course) recovered a lot of artefacts (a
dustbin full) from a monitoring job at a footie oval. In the rush of
recovering them I thought the dump was of domestic rubbish used as fill to
extend the back of the bank.  The stuff has been burned as per this thread.
However, on a slightly closer inspection I am not sure it is domestic in
origin, the range of materials is narrower then what I would expect, it
might be from the tea rooms and pavilion that used to be in the oval
grounds.

Has anyone out there done any work on the percentages of different materials
or the range of artefact classes in 20th century town or household rubbish
dumps? Please keep in mind that my client is not interested in the results
of the monitoring and is not going to pay for me to catalogue that amount of
material let along analyse it so any methodology I try to match has to be
fairly simple and based on basic sorting.

-----Original Message-----
From: New South Associates <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Friday, 11 August 2000 9:48
Subject: Re: 20th Century Refuse Patterns


>20th century (and late 19th century for that matter) refuse disposal on
>southern farmsteads follows the pattern Dan Mour discussed - compustibles
were
>burned and the ashes scattered, glass and metal was dumped, often in nearby
>gullies, and food scraps were either disposed of in rear yard middens,
gardens
>or hog pens.
>
>We were working on a piedmont SC farmstead once, excavating units in the
rear
>yard where we were finding ash, bone, and occassional small fragments of
>pottery and glass.  The farmer who was then living at the house asked me
one
>day (it may have been while we were having a sip of his peach moonshine
which
>he hid in one of the sheds, but thats another story) "Aren't yall looking
for
>old things that the people who lived here would have had?"  I gave him my
>standard explanation of historical archaeology.  To which he replied "Well
how
>come you're not digging in the dump?"  He then took me to a thick patch of
>kudzu off to the side of the farm and as we started wading through the
kudzu I
>could hear and feel the crunch of bottles and cans under my feet. You
couldn't
>see a thing because of the kudzu and the dump had filled an old gully. The
>dump hadn't been found by either the survey or the testing and we would
have
>missed it has well if he hadn't taken an interest in what we were doing.
>
>J. W. (Joe) Joseph, PhD, RPA - New South Associates, Inc.- (770)
498-4155/fax
>(770) 498-3809   www.newsouthassoc.com
>