ARCHEOLOGY AT MIDDLETON PLACE
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.