Home
December 10, 1996
You can tell a lot about how people lived by looking at artifacts. Broken pie dishes, fruit pits, wine bottles, wig curlers, clam shells, duck bones, a pig skeleton, clothes, broken furniture.
Another thing I didn't know: federal law requires an archeologist on federally funded construction projects like Boston's Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project. Hence the Big Dig has its very own archeologist. Bob something. I didn't catch his name when he was introduced [Dr. Robert J. Hasenstab]. Anyway, he spoke to local archeological society meeting tonight about how such buried sites were located (using old maps and new technology), how the sites are excavated, and what they're finding. He talked about three sites:
The best story he told was about excavating a privy belonging to a Katherine Nanny Naylor, who it turns out from court records divorced her husband (according to my historian friend Julie divorce was extremely rare in the colonial times). There's a story that after a big fight with her husband she threw out all his clothes. And guess what they found in the privy? Right, clothes that could have been her husband's , along with some broken furniture - maybe from a fight?
Also in the privy: pie dishes, lots and lots of fruit pits, a whole pig skeleton, duck bones, lobster shells, etc. Even perfectly preserved grain weevils. Was she running a bakery? public house? boarding house? Or did she just like fruit pies? And how did that pig get there with no evidence of trauma? Inquiring minds want to know.
Katherine Nanny herself came to a suspicious end - although Dr. Bob didn't mention that - I found it as I was searching the web for more info. Quite a story. I hope some grad student out there is getting a heck of a thesis out of it.
And future generations will know all about the Big Dig because historians are already on the case documenting it all.
Gee, will archeologists of the future be excavating my privy? Well, not likely because I have town sewage. But can you imagine archeologists in the late 21st or early 22nd century going through septic tanks to figure out what late 20th century Americans ate? They'll think we ate condoms and kitty litter! :-)
All day today, everywhere I went I saw roving bands of power company trucks from all over the northeast. A procession of big blue Con Ed trucks from New York went down Chickering Rd just as I was on my way to get coffee.
Roving bands of arborists are around taking down precarious tree limbs. Mass Highway trucks are grinding up trees into piles of chips and sawdust. It seems there's a pile of sawdust on every corner.
The deeply humorous snowmen are melting but are still recognizable.