Elsevier

Quaternary International

Volume 460, 1 December 2017, Pages 22-29
Quaternary International

Cesspits and the P-P-P-P-problem: The pitfall of the Pompeii premise and the palimpsest

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2016.08.020Get rights and content

Abstract

Given their high yield of artefacts and ecofacts, cesspits are afforded much time and effort in urban archaeology. While historical sources reveal that cesspits were emptied at regular intervals every few years, archaeologists still treat cesspits as closed contexts where artefacts lie fossilized and undisturbed by subsequent cultural or natural processes. This ‘archaeological blind spot’ results from the application of traditional archaeological methods without sufficient attention being paid to cesspit cleaning activities.

This article calls for a re-evaluation of the formation processes associated with archaeological examples of cesspits and for an integrated analysis of the different materials—ceramics, organics, etc.—that are present. These may have entered the cesspit at different times as a result of successive episodes of use and cleaning, resulting in different dates for the cesspit, all of which may be valid in defining its history. If artefacts and ecofacts are studied in isolation from the other materials in the cesspit without a full understanding of its formation and stratigraphy, the result may be quite misleading.

Introduction

Cesspits, the drainage collection of a privy (a dry closet), are a well-known archaeological phenomenon in urban archaeology. Attesting to this is volume 4 of the Lübecker Kolloquium zur Stadtarchäologie in Hanseraum series (Gläser, 2004), a collection of essays on infrastructure in towns in 13 northwestern European countries; hygienic infrastructure is one of the kinds of infrastructure discussed in the volume. There seems to be no country where pre-industrial cesspits were completely absent. The presence of cesspits is recorded regularly by archaeologists in, for example, the English town of Hull (Evans, 2010, Evans, 2004, 64–65) and the German town of Lübeck (Gläser, 2004, 190–192). In the Netherlands, cesspits are archaeologically seen more often. In a town like Haarlem (Fig. 1), 458 cesspits have been recorded (van Oosten, 2016a, van Oosten, 2016b, p. 105).

For both artefact as ecofact specialists, cesspits are ‘among the most fascinating of features to the true archaeologist’ (Greig, 1982, p. 49; see also Evans, 2004, p. 267). Of all archaeological features in urban archaeology, they yield the most archaeological artefacts, and thanks to their waterlogged conditions, they often yield organic ecofacts, such as botanical remains (Greig, 1982, Speelers and van der Valk, 2015), pollen (Knörzer, 1983, Deforce, 2010, Deforce, 2016), insects (Reitz and Shackley, 2012, p. 321; Osborne, 1983, Reilly, 2014), and intestinal parasites that have been excellently preserved (Brinkkemper and van Haaster, 2012, Anastasiou, 2015), all of which have much research potential. Importantly, a cesspit ‘indicator package’ (Smith, 2013) mainly focused on insect remains and plant macrofossils could accurately recognize whether or not a feature identified as a cesspit during archaeological fieldwork contained human excrement (Smith, 2013; in particular Fig. 4). It is no overstatement that dealing with cesspit artefacts and ecofacts requires very much research time during field work, in the post-excavation analysis, and in the report, so much so that urban archaeology—at least in cesspit-rich Holland—is almost synonymous with cesspitology. This is all the more serious in that, as Evans (2004) put it, ‘rather more attention has been devoted to the study of such finds, per se, than to the interpretation of their significance within [their] context’ (p. 267).

The focus on objects is typical for traditional historical archaeology where ‘large-scale studies of vast amount of finds presented in thick volumes’ dominate (Mehler, 2013, p. 18). Such studies are denoted by the German term Materialschlachten (Mehler, 2013, p. 18). Historical archaeology is known for its ‘theorylessness’ (Andrén, 1998, p. 3; see also Austin, 1990, Gilchrist, 2009), ‘since writing appears to take on the same explanatory value as theories in “prehistoric” periods’ (Andrén, 1998, p. 3). The paradox of historical archaeology is that written records inhibit rather than stimulate conceptualisation (Andrén, 1998, pp. 3–4).

It is recognized in urban archaeology that for all artefact and ecofact categories, ‘one of the greatest problems facing the analyst of urban strata is the residual, i.e. material surviving from a significantly earlier period and thus misleading’ (Schofield, 1987, p. 1). However, while in prehistoric archaeology the concept of palimpsest has been in use for decades ‘to describe archaeological features which have a multi-period character’ (Smits, 2010, p. 150; see also Lucas, 2012, pp. 115–116; Bisson et al., 2014, Martinez-Moreno et al., 2015), the term has not taken root in medieval archaeology. In this paper I argue that to avoid false and inaccurate dating and to avoid drawing the wrong sociological inferences from cesspit data in Materialschlachten papers, historical archaeologists must be aware that the prehistoric concepts of palimpsest and time-averaging are key to understanding the archaeological record. The examples used are mostly from the Netherlands, but the issue at stake pertains to cesspits more generally.

Section snippets

Dating cesspits by traditional methods

The main source for dating cesspits are ceramic analysis results. Pottery offers reliable dating, and recently Spek (2004) made an effort to determine the antiquity of plaggen soils using sixteen (!) different dating methods, including radiocarbon, OSL and palaeobotany (pp. 784–814). His unreserved conclusion was that mobile finds in general and pottery in particular, combined with stratigraphy, offered ‘the most reliable means of dating’ (Spek and Groenewoudt, 2007, p. 95). Unfortunately,

Cumulative palimpsests (with a temporal palimpsest)

The traditional approach regarding cesspits also suffers from the assumption that their artefacts represent such a short timespan that assemblages can be used to determine social status (Bartels, 1999, pp. 324–371). This research approach disregards the fact that cesspits yield assemblages deposited over the course of centuries and only rarely have the artefacts in a cesspit been deposited at one specific moment. The social stratification approach only values cesspits in that they contain many

The pitfall of a (partial) true palimpsest in practice

Before I describe Bailey's true palimpsest category, I will discuss two cesspits from day-to-day practices in Dutch urban archaeology that exemplify the pitfalls of the palimpsest theory, and some historical background about cesspits.

In an Oudewater dig (Fig. 1), ceramic specialists established that the overwhelming majority of ceramic artefacts and tobacco pipes from a wooden barrel cesspit dated from the 19th century. A single piece of a redware dripping pan was the one exception (Loopik, 2015

Tackling the P-P-P-P-problem

The American historical archaeologist Schuyler (1988) stated that ‘most historical archaeologists suffer from a “P-P-P-P-P Complex” or the “Pseudo-Processual-Progress-Proferred-by-Prehistorians”’ (p. 36; see also Orser, 1996, p. 14). This affliction is an inferiority complex that includes ‘the self-defacing belief that prehistorians use more sophisticated methodology’ than historical archeologists. Regarding cesspits, this cannot really be denied given the fact that the terminology used (closed

Conclusion

In this article it has been argued that as in prehistory archaeology, so in urban archaeology ‘dissecting a palimpsest’ (Bisson et al., 2014) and ‘puzzling out a palimpsest’ (Bargalló et al., 2015) must be taken seriously. In order to avoid the Pompeii premise and the pitfalls inherent in the palimpsest nature of cesspits, the age-old archaeological contextual analysis needs revaluation. This means that stratigraphy must be the terminus framework that links together the single specialist

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kerry Fast (Toronto) for her assistance with the English text.

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