Privy Pits and Lost Toys: Hauntology and Contemporary Archaeology in Bassett, Virginia

Abstract

Many archaeologists experience a certain level of connection with the past when interacting with sites and artifact assemblages. Personal artifacts such as toys can be particularly captivating. This thesis is interested in the quotidian, unrecorded aspects of a twentieth century domestic site with multiple dwellings occupied by textile factory employees and their families and a hauntological interpretation of that site. How do this site, its artifacts, and its past haunt us?Site 44HR0219 was excavated in two survey efforts during 2021 and 2022. The focus of this survey was the early twentieth century housing constructed by the Bassett-Walker textile factory for its employees and their families. Each house sat on piers and had a private privy. Some blocks of houses shared communal yard space. Sanborn insurance maps indicate that the houses encompassed by the site occupied a single street block, with dwellings facing the streets on all side and with communal yard space at the center of the ring of structures. Privies were located at the rear of each house, near the edges of the communal yard space. The houses represented in this site were occupied between the 1920s and 1970s, after which they were demolished to make space for additional parking for the textile factory. The major feature type observed during Phase II-level survey was privy pits, containing primarily personal materials. Features like this – intact, sealed, and dense in artifacts – can teach us much about the private lives of the employees and their families, particularly the parts that are not commonly recorded by companies or government censuses. Records from the early twentieth century – for example, insurance maps, company records, census records, and oral histories – are often available to a certain extent. There is a local historical society that keeps extensive archives. Many houses from the same construction event are still extant and occupied across the street from the site. The data and dwellings impart a certain sense that we already know what there is to know about the people who occupied this site. Despite this knowledge, sites like this one can be interpreted as haunted (metaphorically). The following thesis uses hauntology as a theoretical framework for discussion of 44HR0219, in order to fully understand how the Smith River Site and the intimate artifacts recovered there impact us in the present.