English creamware from trash pit at Madame John’s.

A trash pit with dense historic fill was one of the most exciting discoveries of Dawdy’s investigations. While ‘midden’ deposits often consist of small fragments of household debris, broken and trampled into yard surfaces, large fragments like the ones shown here typically represent material discarded rapidly over a short length of time. Many of these creamware vessels were unburned, but melted window pane glass and charcoal in the same layer led Dawdy to suggest that the pit’s contents included material broken during the collapse of a wall or shelf in an unburned dportion of the building destroyed in 1788.