Revisiting Past Excavations: An In-Depth Look at Feature B7 from the African Meeting House, Boston, MA

Summary

This paper analyzes a pit feature that was identified during a 1984 excavation in the basement of the African Meeting House, located in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood.  Full excavation of the feature followed in 1986; however, complete analysis of the resulting artifact collection was not possible at the time.  Predating the construction of the prominent African Meeting House, the feature is likely the privy of Augustin Raillion, a hairdresser who occupied a house at 44 Joy Street with two tenants from 1799 to 1806.  Picking up where previous research was forced to leave off, new analysis of this collection, which includes wine bottles, wig curlers, gaming pieces, nearly complete ceramics, and faunal material, sheds light on the function of the feature and the lives of those who contributed to the deposit.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• No Longer Forgotten: Successful Academic Research Drawn from Rehabilitated Collections   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 42