Paul Revere's family outhouse may have been discovered in Boston, which could give archaeologists a window into how people in the Colonial era lived and ate.
Diggers found the possible outhouse Monday and archeologists believe since people disposed of garbage in their outhouses, it should also yield plenty of artifacts, WBZ Radio reported.
"You'd fill it up with you-know-what, and then also your household waste, because everyone threw their trash out into that," city archaeologist Joe Bagley told WBZ. "We're hoping to find the individuals' waste themselves, which, we can get seeds from what they were eating, we can find parasites, find out what their health was, but then everything else that they threw out from their house."
The digging is taking place in an alleyway next to the Pierce-Hichborn House, a Boston historical landmark adjacent to the famous Paul Revere House, Fox News stated. Paul Revere's cousin Nathaniel Hichborn, a boat builder, bought the house in 1781, 70 years after it was built in 1711.
The house remained in the Hichborn family until 1865. Bagley stressed that while the house belonged to a family member, it was not owned by Revere himself, Fox News stated.
"If Revere came over for dinner, he would have been eating off Nathaniel Hichborn's plates – that's what we're hoping to find in the privy," Bagley said, according to Fox News. "It's definitely not Paul Revere's privy. The privy has probably been dug up and carted away 200 years ago."
Bagley told Fox News that, at the time, city law then required outhouses to be 6 feet deep.
"There weren't a lot of options for what to do with your daily trash," Bagley told Fox News, adding that everything from plates and animals bones could be found. "In an excavation in an outhouse in Boston last year, one layer (of soil) contained 8,000 artifacts."
Best known for his midnight ride to Lexington, Massachusetts, in April 1775 that warned John Hancock and Samuel Adams about advancing British soldiers, Revere lived from 1734 to 1818 and owned the nearby house from 1770 to 1800.
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