A couple years ago I asked about reuse and recycling and the effect on the
archaeological record.  This seems appropriate again as the
complete-usage-process Marge Green describes would leave very little behind
(I bet they sold the bones to the bone collector and used the blood for paint).

I have done nothing with the info I presented and collected so long ago as
most of what I got from the list was discouraging messages about how sites
were often esentially considered intact as if the human race became extinct
at the same time the site was abandoned and no one ever returned to
scavenge.  I know better than that.

It also reminds me of a site I dug a few years ago, dating in the last half
ot the 19th century, in which we found not a speck of coal or coal
byproduct, although coal was definitely in use from 1851 on in the
region.  My speculation was that the family was so poor they kept their
reliance on firewood for all their energy.  I didn't write the final report
and the ever so important observation was dropped from the text.  A year or
so ago I was sent a biography of the family and found that the resident was
the local wood chopper for the community!

Long live Negative Evidence (and the ability to recognize it)!

         Dan W.



At 10:08 PM 3/22/02, you wrote:
>   My mother, who was born in 1903, grew up on a very rural farm in
>southern Frederick Co., Md. (There is now a highway next to the
>farm) She took the horse and buggy to a one room school. She took
>the very early morning milk train to Frederick to high school.
>   They raised pigs for their meat. She described the process of
>fall butchering. This was their winter meat! They had to have
>enough to last. The neighbors took turns helping each other and
>they did use everything but the oink. They salted and smoked hams,
>bacon, chops, etc. Made sausage and stuffed the cleaned intestine
>and bladder. When they ran out of casing, they used glass jars and
>canned the sausage.
>   They raised their own vegetables and canned them. Fruit was from
>their own trees and they picked, jammed, and jellied whatever
>berries they had, huckleberries, raspberries, blackberries.
>Oranges were hard to get, expensive and only in season. Oranges
>and nuts were put in the children's Christmas stockings because
>they were rarities.
>   My father grew up in the city, where food could be bought but he
>still has a fondness for some of the pork "parts", some of which
>might be Pa. Dutch variety - souse, head cheese, pickled pig's
>feet, scrapple, sausage.
>   BTW Beef tongue is tender and delicious, all meat, no waste. I
>used to be able to get it at the supermarket but I have to find a
>good farmer's market now.
>Marge Green