Life’s a Ditch: The Role of Ditches, Canals, and Waterways for Animal Waste in Historical New Orleans

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since its founding, New Orleans has required infrastructure to collect and move water from its below-sea-level terrain. The urban development of the city required drainage ditches and canals that connected to bayous, the Mississippi River, or Lake Pontchartrain. Although there was trash collection in the city, the inhabitants of New Orleans used these various waterways for trash disposal, and the city also disposed of collected trash directly into the Mississippi up until the end of the eighteenth century. One category of trash that created significant health and aesthetic concerns was the slaughter of animals for market consumption and the disposal of animal carcasses and offal into the city’s varied waterways. Trash disposal in waterways made trash invisible and thus created the illusion of order. As shown in this presentation, animal disposal created economic and sanitary concerns that eventually prompted the implementation of animal slaughter policies and new infrastructure that was built downriver and away from the urban core of the city. I use faunal remains from a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century urban ditch and the history of the urban slaughterhouse located in the Lower Garden District as examples.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38327.0