Stanwix Hall Hotel Privy

The privy at the Stanwix Hall Hotel site was very large and contained a remarkable amount of information about life at the hotel. The privy was about ten feet wide, twenty feet long, and ten feet deep, as large as a room, but filled with human waste and trash during the nineteenth century.

Health

Privies are used to dispose of human waste or at least contain it for a time before it is removed for disposal elsewhere. Whatever was in the digestive tract ends up in the privy including the eggs of intestinal parasites. Luckily for us, modern sanitation systems have made intestinal parasites very rare in our society, but they were very common in the past. They even found intestinal parasites at a site in France that is 380,000 years old! Specialized study found that the people of nineteenth-century Rome did have intestinal parasites. Read more.

Diet: Seeds

When people eat fruit, they often consume seeds as well, and those seeds are not digested. Those seeds are one of the most visible ways to identify a sample of nightsoil, but they also reveal what people were eating. At the Stanwix Hall Hotel, seeds from grape, strawberry, raspberry or blackberry, elderberry, apple, and tomato were found. We also found peach pits, but these were probably thrown out with the trash.

Diet: Pollen

Pollen can be preserved for a very long time under the right conditions. The privy had those right conditions, and many different kinds of pollen were recovered from the privy. A lot of it was the natural pollen you would expect to find floating in the air, but some of it was only there because people had eaten the foods that it came from. Two of the most important finds were pollen from the spice cloves, and pollen from broccoli or cauliflower. Pollen from members of the same plant family can be so similar that you cannot tell them apart, which is the case for broccoli and cauliflower. Read more.

Diet: Bones

Bones were thrown into the privy with the rest of the trash. From these bones, we can tell that people were eating well at the hotel. Bones from fish, beef, pork, lamb or mutton, and chicken were recovered along with eggshells. There were also a few bones from turkey, turtle, and passenger pigeon, which were rare in the nineteenth century. Read more

Trash

In addition to a place to dispose of human waste, the privy was used to throw away empty bottles, broken pottery, old shoes, and a whole range of other things. Artifacts can be used to learn about how people lived their life in the past. To read more about artifacts and archeology, click here.