In privies and waterways near school yards are found many of the historic toy
marbles. They roll down drains and vents, fall out of pockets in laundry and in
gardens, and from pockets down privies. One excavation in New Orleans was a can
filled with marbles that was guessed to be an empty nest housekeeper's claim to
freedom from such pesky spheres. Check Jeff Carskadden and Richard Gartley's
reports and books on this topic. Sounds like a fun topic anyway!
                                    Archaeologist in the Stacks,
Diane Rice
 
Grace H. Ziesing wrote:
 
> My colleagues and I at the Anthropological Studies Center and Foothill
> Resources are in the process of writing an  Interpretive Report  for a
> project we did near Union Station in downtown Los Angeles a couple years
> ago. The volume is intended to go beyond the standard data-recovery type of
> report by offering our interpretations of the fieldwork and laboratory
> analyses. We would like this to be useful to professionals and interested
> lay readers alike, and, to that end, are compiling a collection of short,
> focused, and well-illustrated essays on various topics relating to the
> research questions we originally posed.
>
> One of the topics is called  Cleaning House  and is an attempt to explain
> how the pits, privies, and wells we all so love to find got filled with
> household refuse in the first place. The kinds of deposits we ve been
> finding seem to be the result of more than just everyday garbage disposal;
> they appear to represent something more along the lines of episodic
> housecleaning or the result of periodic household transitions.
>
> Does anyone have any thoughts on this? We d love to incorporate the ideas
> and observations of our archaeological brethren. Tell us about your hollow
> features, what you found in them, and how you interpreted them.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mary Praetzellis and Julia Costello