The Boghouse

03/07/2024

Archaeology is exhausting!

23/06/2024

Four years of processing (and several nearby privies) later, we've got a nearly-complete Staffordshire Slipware teacup. Those black dots on the inside are not the dripped-slip decoration common on wares of this style - we have a sticker system to keep track of which privy each artifact comes from. 85% of this guy came from the bottom of the south privy on 103 Callowhill Street (a green dot with the letter B). But Melissa discovered three matching pieces in the finds from the south privy on 107 Callowhill Street - which we use a black dot to mark.

24/05/2024

A (sadly headless) Staffordshire agateware cat! Excavated from our spring 2021 dig, from a 19th-century privy at the edge of 109 Callowhill St, and recently cleaned in our kitchen sink. Melissa knew what it was as soon as she laid eyes on it because she's obsessed with these things; second pic is from a more complete example recently sold at auction.

30/04/2024

There's a plan to turn a surface parking lot in Old City Philadelphia into a replica of the Tun Tavern. The original was located just about where I-95 plowed through the Delaware waterfront.

With groundbreaking slated to happen in November, are there any plans for archaeology on this plot, or will the new Tun Tavern result in the same kind of destruction of historical evidence that the original Tun Tavern suffered? You only get one chance, with something like this.

Philly is no stranger to history, having served as a central location for many of the larger events of the Colonial days. One spot where plenty took place was the Tun Tavern, which had an outsized impact during its existence from 1686 to 1781. Originally sitting east of Front St. between Chestnut &....

28/11/2023

"Alice Tierney" and "Escobar" at Rutgers University—New Brunswick Mason Gross School of the Arts coming up this Friday and Sunday!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E-_85VI-Hw

See this awesome little promo vid shot by Rutgers film students. Cameo appearances by Matt Dunphy and one of the empty cat litter buckets I used to bring genuine 19th century oyster shells to campus to be used as props 😆

Directed by Mikhaela Mahony, Alice Tierney libretto by Jacqueline Goldfinger 🥰

Dec. 1 & 3, 2023: Workshop performances of Rutgers faculty Melissa Dunphy's "Alice Tierney" and PhD student Matteo Neri's "Escobar"Presented by Opera Theater...

26/11/2023

We're in Asheville for Matt's step-grandma's 100th birthday, and stopped by a downtown antiques store. There had to have been a few hundred German stein there, but when Melissa saw this one, she got excited: IT'S JUST LIKE THE WESTERWALD TANKARD FROM THE PRIVY, BUY IT!! They didn't know what they had; we paid $40, and judging from the lower handle attachment, it miiiight even pre-date our example! When we open our museum we'll put it next to ours so people can see what a whole one with a lid looks like.

Following in the footsteps of Rob Hunter , we took it to Starbucks for breakfast 🧜‍♀️🧜‍♂️

10/11/2023

OMGGGG We are crawling out of the Boghouse and into a proper fancy room at the Colonial Williamsburg museum, where we'll be giving our first LEGIT CONFERENCE PRESENTATION next March, along with a bunch of our bestest ceramics nerd friends!!! Beyond excited, although it's going to be a challenge to keep our talk under 25 minutes 😅

https://web.cvent.com/event/5b83ab3c-545c-401b-9973-eb649c80eed3/summary

10/11/2023

Pennsylvania is asking for your input on a Statewide Historic Preservation Plan - there's more information at this link, as well as a comprehensive survey asking for thoughtful answers.

If you're reading this, you're probably the right kind of person to contribute to the direction of the future of historic preservation in PA! Check it out:

Be a part of the statewide historic preservation planning process in Pennsylvania by taking a short survey.

17/09/2023

Boss-level puzzling. Glass is already super difficult, but this 18th-century mallet bottle, whose shards seemed to fall into chemically different parts of the privy and came out with vastly contrasting patinas, was ridiculous; all its pieces were sorted into different piles. We call it the Harlequin. From the top of the 103 South privy

17/09/2023

Prunt! A hilarious word that refers to this little raspberry decoration on this piece of glass from the 103 South Privy. Melissa was very excited because she learned this term from .mudlark's feed - she finds these on 16th- and 17th-century glassware on the Thames foreshore. This one is from an 18th-century context, and we would LOVE to know what the form is, as this is all we have of this artifact, and it's a weird shape, nothing else like it from our privies. Melissa likes to complain that glassblowers were a lot more experimental with their forms than potters, which makes puzzling things together much more of a challenge. If you think you know what this was when it was whole, please leave a comment! Meanwhile, we'll be saying the word "prunt" out loud repeatedly because it is objectively a very funny word.

02/09/2023

Took 90 photos of Melissa's handiwork today, and while the pictures look pretty good, I think I could probably do better.

There's also been good progress on the new website for The Boghouse, which notably will include transcripts of every episode.

02/09/2023

(Guess:Who)

03/08/2023

Google and bottle books say this is a saddle flask; our first, so we had to look it up. It doesn't stand on its own because you're always carrying it as you ride your trusty steed into the sunset. I think this is all we have of it, but the shape is there! From the bottom of the 103 South Privy

28/07/2023

Melissa had a day or two free, and turned her puzzle solving skills toward the huge pile of glass we haven't processed yet, focusing at the moment at seven Chestnut bottles.

02/07/2023

Who needs the Thames? After a good rain, we can mudlark in the dog park across the street from our home in Philly! We always spot 18th- and 19th-century sherds, likely churned up from demolished privies and dumped back into the ground when the adjacent stretch of I-95 was built in the late 1970s

26/06/2023

Wedgwood Portland Vase street art spotted walking back to our hotel on one of our last nights in London

13/06/2023

Also, here's a video of Melissa finding a puppetry related artifact in the dirt lol. Interests collide!

13/06/2023

Citizen archaeologist brainworms: we are in Ibiza for Matt's work, and walked up to the 1763 Torre de Portinatx right next to the hotel. Melissa COULD NOT stop larking, even though it's probably all modern fill. Found some sherds! One at least looks a lot like a Spanish olive jar (we have pieces of one of those in our privy).

24/05/2023

"A horse in the toilet," you say? Hmmmm I wonder who could be speaking in a podcast about that topic? (Spoiler: it's Melissa)

Plus, bugs using superpropulsion on their p*e, a horse in the toilet, and other weird things we learned this week.

26/11/2022

You knew this was coming: our first human body artifact! This cavity-stricken tooth, as mentioned in EPISODE 27, came out of the second sift of the 103 Callowhill South Privy. Matt likes to joke that the doorknob we also found helped extract it. Our mortician friend Ruth tells us this is an M1 or M2 upper molar.

25/11/2022

Moonlight retrospective 😢 If you listen carefully, you can hear Matt's voice catch in episode 27 as we talk about her demise, which set Melissa off again crying while she was editing this week. RIP (rest in privy), you sweet, stupid little pooper.

24/11/2022

One for the bottle guys: Matt's favorite artifact from the 103 Callowhill South Privy: a wine bottle (aka a mallet) in such perfect condition it looks like it was cellar-kept, or bought as a reproduction in Colonial Williamsburg.

24/11/2022

BONNIN AND MORRIS. Conventional archaeological wisdom is that this is rare stuff, but apparently not in the privies we dig! Here is the (transfer printed!?!? OMG) teabowl we found in the 103 South Privy, and a probable matching saucer fragment. More news coming in the next episode, but let's just say that at this point, based on our experiences, if we *don't* find B&M in a privy, we're disappointed LMAO

24/11/2022

Don't know if this counts as ASMR, but made did a slowmo video of Michael's industrial sifter in action during the second sift, if you're in the market for more archaeology p**n. We went through months of this. MONTHS.