Ten Right-Sided Sheep Femora and Other Peculiarities: What To Make of the Arch Street Faunal Assemblage

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Bones and Burials in Philadelphia: The Arch Street Project’s Multidisciplinary Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1860, a concerned party claimed that neighboring tenement dwellers used the cemetery of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia as their personal dumping ground, leaving behind ‘refuse of their domestic economy’ in the form of material culture and food waste. In 2017, salvage archaeology operations at the cemetery recovered a small faunal assemblage of 214 identified specimens, and an additional 26 specimens likely from the same timeframe. Due to rushed recovery, the assemblage is both small and likely incomplete, potentially leading to peculiarities in species and element representation. But the assemblage nevertheless offers insight into the economy and habits of the tenement occupants who took advantage of the neglected church grounds.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Bones and Burials in Philadelphia: The Arch Street Project’s Multidisciplinary Research   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23318