A small group of amateur archaeologists in Philadelphia are digging into the city\u2019s past \u2014 by excavating ancient outhouses.<\/p>\n
Armed with shovels, roughly 15 \u201cprivy diggers\u201d are exposing and exploring 300-year-old bathrooms buried beneath the city\u2019s historic neighborhoods, searching for artifacts.<\/p>\n
Their finds include glass bottles, pottery shards, and household items owners tossed into privies as trash. Some pieces can fetch hundreds \u2014 even thousands \u2014 of dollars among collectors.<\/p>\n
The privy diggers often find 300-year-old glass objects that long-ago owners discarded by throwing them into their outhouses. Courtesy of Matt and Melissa Dunphy<\/p>\n
For Philadelphia residents Matt Dunphy, an e-commerce engineer, and wife Melissa Dunphy, a composer with a doctorate in music, the fascination began when they bought a home with an old small theater, where magic shows used to take place.<\/p>\n
The property in Old City had a deed dating back to 1745. <\/p>\n
They began to renovate.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we first saw bits of pottery and old bottles in the dirt coming out of the ground, it piqued our curiosity about who lived here before us,\u201d Matt told The Post. <\/p>\n
The construction workers uncovered two old outhouses on their property, one the Dunphys excavated right away. Since then, they\u2019ve dug up six privies in the vicinity and launched a podcast, \u201cThe Boghouse,\u201d about their discoveries. <\/p>\n
In Philly, people are legally allowed to keep what they find.<\/p>\n
But the artifacts are only the beginning for the Dunphys. <\/p>\n
Each new item sends them searching through newspaper archives, maps, tax records, and historical documents to learn about the people who once owned them.<\/p>\n
Matt and Melissa Dunphy bought an old theater and home in Philadelphia and began to explore beneath it. Their finds led them to excavate more sites and join a group of \u201cprivy diggers,\u201d amateur archaeologists. Courtesy of Matt and Melissa Dunphy<\/p>\n
Melissa Dunphy works to identify and catalogue some of the objects they find in their digs. The couple began a podcast called \u201cThe Boghouse,\u201d in which they talk about their digs and the various treasures they find. Courtesy of Matt and Melissa Dunphy<\/p>\n
\u201cWith so much waste and loss happening in the world, bringing these everyday items to the the surface and putting them together for the first time in hundreds of years feels a little bit like fighting entropy,\u201d Matt said.<\/p>\n
Still, the amateur excavators has sparked criticism from professional archaeologists who argue untrained hobbyists risk destroying valuable historical sites.<\/p>\n
They say Philadelphia has done little to protect its buried history \u2014 unlike Boston or Alexandria, Va.<\/p>\n
\u201cI find it very easy to sympathize with real archaeologists,\u201d Matt said. \u201cYou\u2019re still paying off your student loans, and a bunch of dudes without so much as an associates degree are destroying historical sites hoping to find a blue bottle they can sell for a couple hundred bucks.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut hopefully, together we can raise awareness and strengthen institutional-level protections for preserving and documenting our buried history.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A small group of amateur archaeologists in Philadelphia are digging into the city\u2019s past \u2014 by excavating ancient…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":639125,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,472,39101,1448,2830,1311,28148,67,586,132,5230,68,1154,2969],"class_list":["post-639124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-america","tag-history","tag-hobbies","tag-pa","tag-pennsylvania","tag-philadelphia","tag-treasure","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-news","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116189123515847422","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}