People Pay To Study This
Longtime readers know I am a bit of a history buff. But archaeologists have always fascinated me in particular. These folks pay a lot of money in college tuition then go out and do backbreaking labor in usually nasty conditions. All to gain a better understanding of the past. Of course, some conditions are much nastier than others. Such as digging into a pit full of 130-year old, well aged human excrement.
Marisa Solorzano is nose-deep in 130-year-old fecal matter.
The archaeologist, a member of a team excavating a housing site in what used to be the center of Ventura, was on her knees Monday, burrowing a small hand trawl into the odorous soil of an early women's outhouse.
Glamorous it is not. But the labor-intensive work has paid dividends — a pistol dating to the 1800s, a bowie knife, several small whiskey flasks and a set of false teeth all have been unearthed from either the women's outhouse or a nearby men's.
Then there were the mysterious dog skulls. A large blade from a set of sheep shears was found next to two dog skulls, one with a couple of vertebrae still attached.
"It might be an early crime scene," project archaeologist John Foster said. "It looks like the two dogs were decapitated. Then whoever did it dumped the skulls and the blade, thinking the women probably wouldn't be looking too hard into the bottom of the privy."
Um, no. But 130 years later, a woman is doing just that. Odd, isn't it? There is video at the link as well.
By Lars Walker, Wednesday, 18 July , 2007 @ 6:24 am
I once helped dig out a privy not nearly that old. The soil was remarkably dry and odor-free, at least in that case.
And the old privies were tremendous places for people to lose stuff. An old joke tells of Ole cursing and throwing his wallet down a privy hole.
“Vhy did you do dat?” asked Sven.
“Because I yust dropped a qvarter down dere. An’ I’m blasted if I’ll climb down in dat hole for yust a qvarter!”