Urban Archeology

What started out as a productive but average Saturday fixing some windows and staining some deck rails turned a bit odd as I heard this very loud knocking at my door. I was out back and I had my stereo blasting and set on random with lots of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest so it was hard to hear anyone out front. I figured it was some friend that showed up and was trying to convince me to actually leave the house. Ha! No way. It was a group of three urban archeologists that asked me if they could take soil samples of my backyard and possibly do some digging. I had no idea the full extent of what they really meant. I said sure, go ahead. The yard is mostly weeds anyway and I figured it wouldn’t get any worse. In the back of my mind I was wondering what they were trying to steal or sell me.

They started by using this 5 foot long tee shape instrument and were probing the soil looking for what would have once been the out house / garbage dump of the house. Specifically they were looking for an ash layer about 5 to 10 feet down. Maybe it would clear things up to explain a bit about my house. It was built sometime before the 1900s but all the records burned down in the San Francisco fire of 1906 so we have no way of knowing exactly how old the place is. What I do know is that the bathroom was added on at some point so at one time there was an outhouse (we hope). What these guys were saying was that in addition to the outhouse, often homes would dig a large hole or fill in an existing dried up well with their garbage / sewage and that was what they were looking for. Old garbage. They would use the probe to find an ash layer or a soft spot deep in the soil and dig down to check it out.


After a few pilot holes they determined that the place that they were looking for was more or less under the landing of the deck stairs. They began digging about 2-ish and ended up going down about 15 feet in 5 hours. It’s kind of hard to tell from the perspective in the photos but it was about the depth of two people or more. I thought that it was amazing that that much dirt could be moved that quickly but they said that they had a lot of experience. What a way to spend your weekends. I’m assuming they weren’t pros. They ended up using a short shovel because the hole was too narrow for the long handled type. Also, they began using a bucket to bring the dirt up as it was too deep to toss the dirt out or too messy as the water began to fill up in the bottom and turn everything into mud. You can just see the tee handle, bucket rope and short shovel in the photo below


As they were digging through the layers of soil they would yell excitedly at each other, “this is a 70s hole, I’m sure of it” or “this better not be a 90s hole cause I missed a date to dig this thing”. What they were talking about, of course, was that it was a garbage pit from the 1870s or 1890s. Amazingly, they began to pull out a few intact bottles and note that they were just 1880s common bottles. The ones pictured are (in the top photo from left to right) a Vaseline bottle, an inkwell and a bottle of shoe polish. There also were plenty of broken dishes and pottery but it wasn’t generally recognizable but did give clues about the age of the strata. At one point they handed me a broken bottle and plate that they claimed were Gold Rush / Civil War era. You could see all the air bubbles and irregularities in the glass, nothing like the smooth clear ones I’m used to, that I take for granted.


This was about in the middle of the dig and they felt that there were many more bottles down there but they just needed to go down a bit deeper. So the digging continued for a while more and they began to see the outline of the sand walls of the well so they had found the right spot. You can just make out the lighter colored edges in the hole in the photo above. The problem was there just wasn’t that much “garbage” in there and as it got darker and nothing significant turned up they called it a day and filled the hole in. They hosed off their gear and thanked me for letting them dig and handed me the other bottles that they found. One was a beautiful square medicine bottle. They told me that medicine was always kept in square bottles so that the blind will recognize them by shape. Is that true? They also found two more generic ceramic type bottles from Glasgow, Scotland that they said were bought in bulk and filled with a variety of things. They ended up keeping a small China bowl and a porcelain doll head. They said that a lot of the plates and bowls they found were "China" and that they were thrown away because it was cheap and disposable at the time.

It is amazing to think that this history has been buried in my backyard, right under our feet, for a hundred years. I think about the people who lived here in this house and wonder what they must been like. What did they do for a living, where were they from, where their descendants are now?