[Illustration: uncaptioned]
Modern historical archeology, like archeology in general, is based on
two main premises. First, where man has lived for any length of time, he
has left behind artifacts—bits of food, broken pottery, tools, and
ornaments—that tell us something of his way of life. Second, human
behavior is, to a certain extent, patterned and predictable, and similar
artifacts will be found on similar sites. Thus, even if two household
sites are separated by hundreds of years of technological innovation,
they may yield utensils used for roughly the same purposes. If two
contemporary sites produce artifacts of the same style and workmanship,
then their inhabitants shared at least some aspects of a single culture,
and variations between the sites can provide valuable clues to
adaptations of that culture to different circumstances.
The distinction between prehistoric and historical archeology is based
not on differences in technology but on the presence or absence of
written records. While prehistoric archeologists reconstruct ancient
cultures primarily from artifactual evidence, historical archeology
employs both documents and material remains to study literate societies
and the pre-literate populations whom they influenced. In much of Europe
and Asia, the historic period begins centuries before Christ, but in
North America, historical archeology is concerned with the period of
recorded European exploration and occupation extending from the
sixteenth century to the present.
From these four centuries we have innumerable written records covering a
vast array of subjects. But although these records contain a wealth of
information, they cannot always be trusted to be either thorough or
accurate. In addition, historians are often most interested in aspects
of daily life—such as health, diet, and the living conditions of the
unlettered poor—that are frequently omitted altogether from written
records. By examining the record of activities that people have left in
the soil, archeology can provide written history with a comparatively
unbiased account of the economic conditions underlying historical
change.
Probably the most obvious indicators of past living conditions are
buildings, around which most human activities are centered. On most
historic sites these include not only residences but also a variety of
outbuildings such as privies, barns, and work buildings that are crucial
to understanding the site as a whole. This is especially true of such
complex institutions as plantations, where hundreds of people may have
lived and worked over an area of many acres. Since many of these
buildings have long since disappeared, the first task of the excavator
is to find them by tracing the concentrations of debris that,
fortunately for archeologists, our ancestors scattered freely around
their dwellings and workplaces.
The Middleton Place privy is a modest one-story building half hidden in
live oaks behind the Middleton House museum. It has outlasted many of
its more imposing contemporaries to become one of the oldest standing
structures at Middleton Place. Built in the late eighteenth or early
nineteenth century, the privy was one of the few plantation buildings to
escape destruction by Sherman’s troops in 1865. In its long lifetime it
has served as an outdoor latrine, a generator house, and a storage
building. Now, newly equipped with running water and flush toilets, it
is the only antebellum building at Middleton Place still serving the
purpose for which it was constructed.
An outdoor privy may seem an unlikely place to conduct an archeological
excavation. Much eighteenth and nineteenth century trash was simply
tossed out the back door, but the backyard privy, ready made for waste
disposal and usually handily located a few dozen feet from the house,
also received its share of household disposables. As a privy pit neared
abandonment, the top layers were often stuffed with broken objects
before it was sealed and a new hole dug.
The privy is set solidly atop a rectangular brick-lined pit, which house
servants kept open and functioning for more than 100 years with a system
of “honey buckets.” When the privy was finally abandoned in the 1920s,
the entire pit, not just the top few inches, was packed with broken or
unusable household goods.
The privy pit was sealed by J. J. Pringle Smith, who laid a concrete
floor in the privy building and converted it into a shed for the
plantation’s first electric generator. With the subsequent arrival of
outside electrical power, the generator too was abandoned, and the privy
stood undisturbed for the next 40 years. In 1978 workmen remodeling the
building into a modern restroom broke through the concrete floor to the
artifact-laden pit below. The artifacts were excavated and analyzed by
archeologists from the University of South Carolina’s Institute of
Archeology and Anthropology, and are now on display in the Middleton
Place Spring House Museum.
Privy pits, being relatively shallow, normally contain objects
accumulated and discarded within a very few years. The Middleton privy,
only three feet deep, was expected to be no exception. Once the
artifacts had been cleaned and restored, however, it became apparent
that this was no short-term kitchen deposit, but a diverse assemblage of
objects spanning more than 100 years of the plantation’s history.
A sealed archeological deposit can date no earlier than its most recent
artifact, and a handful of twentieth century utility bottles confirmed
that this chronological hodgepodge had been thrown into the privy pit
shortly after the arrival of the Pringle Smith family in 1925. The
scarcity of items from the Smiths’ period of residence, however,
suggested that the family had filled the privy not with their own trash
but with objects accumulated by the Middletons in the preceding century.
The artifacts could not have collected in the house before 1871, when
the Middletons moved back to their war-ravaged estate, or after 1900,
when Susan Middleton’s death ended the plantation’s role as a regular
residence. The artifacts left in the house spanned Susan and her
husband’s entire lifetimes, from the costly dinnerwares of the wealthy
planter to the plain stone china of his widow. As much as any exhibit at
Middleton Place, then, the artifacts on display in the Spring House
Museum bear testimony to the cycle of wealth and poverty, prosperity and
decay, that characterized the nineteenth century Middletons and their
plantation.