The Saint Louis Cathedral is an iconic fixture of the New Orleans landscape. The present structure is at least the third building to serve as a Catholic church here since the French occupied the territory in 1718. In 2024, three hundred years after the first permanent structure was erected on the site, the building needed serious renovations. The Archdiocese contacted the University of New Orleans’s (UNO) Department of Anthropology during test excavations along the Cathedral’s foundation meant to inform those plans.

Dr. Ryan Gray from UNO led a team of students and volunteers to expose the centuries of history accumulated in layers across the site. The team found Indigenous, French, Spanish, and English pottery, beads and elements from religious medals, straight pins that fastened muslin cloth to the windows to allow light into the building before glass was available in the colony, stained glass fragments, and other artifacts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

At the time of this writing, UNO is still processing artifacts from the series of excavations. Please look for updates from our future website (www.gnoarch.com) expected to go live in Summer of 2024.

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In 2014, the University of New Orleans was invited to conduct archaeological testing at 936 St. Peter Street while the property was undergoing renovations. Below the surface layer, archaeologists discovered the opening of a privy shaft. The privy was brick-lined with a wood-lined base.

The privy deposit appeared to represent a single, rapid deposition, probably within the time frame of the 1860s. This rapid deposition likely happened at the time of a clean-out and renovation of the rear building, when the use of this privy was abandoned due perhaps to shifting use of the outbuilding. The privy fill contained a significant quantity of typical domestic debris from the mid-nineteenth century: ceramic tablewares, including whiteware, ironstone, and porcelain; chamber pots; glass bottles; and smoking pipes.

What stood out most during the excavation of the privy was the abundance of animal remains, especially the number of elements from skulls. When a rough count was taken of the entire assemblage, the privy feature was found to contain a total of 147 Caprine (goat or sheep) skulls.

So, what could explain the heavy presence of goat and/or sheep skulls in the privy feature at 936 St. Peter Street? There are, of course, a number of cuisines in which brains are a delicacy, and dishes, particularly stews, in which goat heads play a prominent role, especially in African and Caribbean cultures. However, certain features of this assemblage taken together with other artifacts from the privy suggest that the faunal assemblage recovered from the privy at 936 St. Peter Street is representative of more than just urban diets.

An analysis of the butchery marks found on faunal material can indicate differences in patterns of faunal utilization. Analysts recorded the number of cuts, chops, fractures, shears, and saw marks present on each bone to determine if there were differences in butchery methods between different species. Most of the bones that were present were utilized as typical food sources and were from the postcranial skeleton. Some of these bones were either sawn or shorn (as with a sharp cleaver), marks that are typically made by a butcher or someone familiar with animal slaughter. However, an inordinate number of the butchery marks present on Caprine remains were indicative of cracking into the skulls to retrieve the brains inside, as evidenced by shearing and chop marks across the back of the skulls.

It is likely that the abundance of goat skulls and their associated butchery patterns represent the production waste from household-level tanning and hide processing, probably for use in fine leather work. Historical documents and ethnohistorical observations note the use of animal brains in the process of hide tanning, particularly when making buckskin.

The sheer quantity of goat skulls in relation to other skeletal elements point to the likelihood that the goat brains were being put to a use in manufacturing rather than being consumed. Some of the other artifacts from the privy also support the connection of the assemblage to leatherwork. An abundance of cuprous metal straight pins, some occurring in clumps corroded together, were found within the privy fill along with thimbles, buttons, and hook and eye fasteners. While these items are not atypical finds at urban sites, their abundance is suggestive. Likewise, household production is suggested by some other artifacts in the assemblage, including knives, folded strap-metal, and a lace bobbin, all of which may be associated with hide production and its associated activities.

The growth of industrialization and urbanization in the late-eighteenth century had far reaching impacts on developing cities. Urban centers, like New Orleans, rapidly became crowded and dirty. Modes of production were centered around the household with production typically taking place within household lots or near the residences of employers. But as the city continued to expand during the nineteenth century, concerns over sanitation and urban waste disposal resulted in the segregation of nuisance industries, such as slaughterhouses and tanneries, to the outskirts of town. Still, small-scale manufacturing persisted, with household-level production only loosely regulated, despite the potential health issues it could generate.

This historical shift from cottage to commercial industry resulting from urban growth provides a lens through which we may interpret the archaeological assemblage at 936 St. Peter Street. This property was a very small urban lot in what had come to be a distinctly residential area by this time, and it is not hard to imagine the foul mess that the work of splitting hundreds of animal skulls and extracting the brains would incur in a residential yard . The noisome byproduct, and likely the complaints from neighboring tenants, may explain the rapid deposition of the privy contents and the renovation of the outbuilding in the 1860s. Perhaps the landlord at 936 St. Peter and/or their neighbors were no longer willing to tolerate a back yard covered in blood and Caprine effluvia. Rather than cleaning out privy contents from this period, the landlord or new residents instead built a completely new outbuilding and privy altogether, burying the putrid cranial decay until archaeological excavations uncovered it a century and a half later.

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Today the blocks bound by Magnolia, Seventh, Freret, and Sixth streets appear to be a vacant greenspace. However, for nearly a century, these two blocks housed the Thomy Lafon School complex. Originally built in 1906, the property operated as a school throughout the twentieth century until 2005, when it was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The main school building was demolished in August 2011. Archaeologists monitored this process and discovered that the two blocks once occupied by this school had an even longer history as the site of two nineteenth century cemeteries called Locust Grove Cemeteries Nos. 1 and 2. The Locust Grove Cemeteries No. 1 and No. 2. were established between  1865-1879 for the city’s indigent residents. By this period, there were several cemeteries in this vicinity including Lafayette Cemeteries Nos. 1 and 2 and St Joseph Cemeteries Nos. 1 and 2. The Lafayette cemeteries  were municipal, ostensibly reserved for residents of what was then the city’s  Fourth District, while the St. Joseph Cemeteries only interred bodies for a fee. Lafayette Cemetery No 2. had recently  been overwhelmed with burials after the devastating Yellow Fever outbreak in 1853, and was ordered to be closed for burials outside of the Fourth District. Atypically, and possibly part of Reconstruction Era policies, a plot of land was reserved in Lafayette Cemetery No. 2 in which to bury Black residents from the Fourth District who could pay. Black residents whose families could not pay would be buried in the new cemetery, called Locust Grove.  The first Locust Grove Cemetery was opened in 1865. In March 1877, the city opened Locust Grove Cemetery No. 2. In 1878, yet another Yellow Fever epidemic overwhelmed the city;  the conditions of the cemeteries began deteriorating, and the citizens and officials of New Orleans began to take notice. Many individuals reported grim encounters and gave details of piled up bodies, exposed corpses, and multiple bodies shoved into one grave. In January 1880, only 27 years after the first and 3 years after the second, The Daily Picayune reported that the  Locust Grove Cemeteries were closed, covered with soil, and sown with grass seed. In the years after its closing the land was used as a dumping ground. Within only a couple of decades, a school for Black students was constructed near the former Locust Grove Cemeteries. This school was named in remembrance of the late Thomy Lafon, a Black philanthropist in New Orleans. The first building accommodated 500 students. Soon after, the school was burned down in conjunction with the Race Riot of 1900 sparked by the murder of Robert Charles.  The African American residents of New Orleans began petitioning for the school to be rebuilt. Plans were underway by March 1905 and the second Thomy Lafon School was ready by the 1906-1907 school year. This time, the City Council selected the site of the former Locust Grove Cemeteries to build the second school. A playground was built in the summer of 1915 and it became the  first playground in the U.S. established for African American children. In 1922, Thomy Lafon School had 30 classrooms and 2,515 students enrolled, making it the largest African American elementary school in the United States.  This layered site contains some of the best and worst aspects of New Orleans’ history. When looking at New Orleans’ rich history of cemetery use and funerary activities, there are some unique themes that can be uncovered. Setting certain spaces aside for the dead, classifying people after death based on wealth or race, and deciding who should be buried where are all cultural patterns that reflect and can often be predicted by one’s status while alive. As we see in Locust Cemeteries, the ways someone’s body was handled after death was contingent on emerging politics, like those shifting across New Orleans’ Reconstruction-era  landscape. The mistreatment and mishandling of the human remains of New Orleans’ poor and Black residents is unfortunately  seen repeatedly in archaeological sites like Locust Grove Cemetery.  When analyzing this space through the context of the Thomy Lafon School, similar themes echo. A large part of Louisiana’s past consists of inequality and prejudice towards African American residents from slavery to segregation. The transfer of a polluted, indigent burial ground into a school for Black children reflects broader patterns  of systematic racism. Even so, Thomy Lafon School, established as a successful Black school during the era of separate but equal, represented the city’s Black excellence and resistance to racism. The school’s perseverance and success over the years highlights the theme of progress and advancement for the African American community in New Orleans throughout the twentieth century. 

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In 2009-2010, archaeologists from ESI excavated the remains of a pottery from one of the blocks during the Lafitte Housing Complex renovation along what used to have been the Carondelet “Old Basin” Canal. Archival research links the pottery at City Square 281 to Lucien M. Gex from 1890-1891, enumerated as 253 Carondelet Walk, the walking path that paralleled the shipping canal. Further research unravels that this pottery was likely a salvage venture, stemming from another failed pottery, Porcelain Works, two blocks away. Advertised in 1883 as Porcelain Works, this original pottery purported to manufacture Limoges porcelain manufactured with American clay. However, newspaper articles indicate that Porcelain Works failed after only a year, and then burned to the ground in 1885. The remnants of pottery at the second site, 253 Carondelet Walk, includes hand-worked clay, biscuit ware, irregularly fired pottery sherds, and kiln furniture with a spatial distribution that suggests the site was an active site of pottery production. By 1900, the United States Census enumerates Lucien M. Gex and his family in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, leaving his pottery venture behind.

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Charity Hospital was an iconic institution in the history of New Orleans, and at the time of its closure in 2015, one of the longest lasting public institutions in the United States. Both Charity Hospital and its cemeteries are indelibly linked to the changed landscape of the city after Hurricane Katrina. Originally traced to the colonial period and operated by various charitable initiatives, the first Charity hospital was placed in the Vieux Carré in 1736. In the period from 1747-1815, the hospital moved to Toulouse Street and Rampart, then to Conti and Basin streets near today’s Lady Guadalupe Church, and finally to Baronne Street and University Place.

In 1834, it moved one last time to its present-day location, soon to be operated by the Sisters of Charity, and was run as a medical school operated by the State of Louisiana until its closure in 2015. Charity Hospital continued to see patients during its function as a medical school, and included 1000 beds by 1850. To accommodate the need for burial space, especially for the indigent population of New Orleans that the hospital treated, Charity Hospital secured two tracts of land — Charity Hospital Cemetery No.1 in 1847 on the riverside of Bayou Metairie, and Charity Hospital Cemetery No. 2 in 1849 on the lakeside of Bayou Metairie, just adjacent to Cypress Grove Cemetery. 

The effects of stormwaters from the levee breaches caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 damaged the interior of the hospital. After almost a decade of debate about what to do with the building, the state finally began construction on a new facility called the University Medical Center (UMC). The closure of Charity Hospital after Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath caused much public outcry. Among many reasons was that its closure caused a rupture to its legacy of treating the area’s marginalized populations. 

While Charity Hospital remained shuttered during the first years of the recovery effort, Charity Hospital Cemetery No. 1 became the site for the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. This memorial serves as the final resting place to the 86 people who died during the storm whose bodies remained unclaimed or unidentified, as well as a memorial dedicated to the 1,100 people who died in and around New Orleans due to the effects and after effects of the storm. The money to construct the memorial was provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), with donations of up to $100,000 from the Funeral Service Foundation, part of the National Funeral Directors Association. This Association created the momentum for the creation of the monument and the final burial of the unclaimed bodies by the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2008. The monument consists of mausoleums arranged in a spiral, using the shape of the hurricane to create a “meditative labyrinth…[and a] healing space for reflection,” to quote a portion of the words inscribed on the monument. 

Archaeological monitoring was required at Charity Hospital No. 1 during the construction of the memorial. Although the majority of the memorial was designed to be above ground, surface grading and excavation of select postholes for stabilization required oversight. Earth Search, Inc. monitored construction for the memorial in 2008, and in the process fragments from three individuals were exhumed, and examined. The remains, combined with remains from Charity Hospital Cemetery No. 2 were finally reinterred in one of the mausoleums in 2021.

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In 2017, Dr. D. Ryan Gray led students and volunteers from University of New Orleans to excavate a portion of a private residence in the French Quarter located at 626 Bourbon Street. The team excavated a series of test units and shovel tests in the historical footprint of the modern property’s backyard and ground floor. Artifacts dated to the antebellum and included crucibles - ceramic vessels used in metalworking. The exact reason that they were used in this household is unknown, but newspaper records suggest that in the antebellum, crucibles were used for blacksmithing, gold prospecting, experimentation, counterfeiting, and theft. 

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During 2013 investigations in City Square 350, archaeologists excavated a large and well-constructed brick-lined privy shaft, producing a rich assemblage of glass containers and ceramic vessels, along with an abundance of personal items, including many items related to armaments that are not typical in urban assemblages, including wooden gun stocks, a trigger guard and assembly, a saber hilt and blade, a second sword handle, and numerous pieces of lead ball shot and bullets. Further hinting at a special function for the assemblage was a series of figural smoking pipe bowls, including two of the U.S. Presidents Ulysses Grant and Zachary Taylor, and another of a soldier.

The accuracy of historic map overlays becomes more questionable as one moves farther back into the nineteenth century. Initially, researchers thought the privy was associated with the 344/2314-2316 Erato Street address, where a series of police officers (named J.J. Bermingham, Henry Campbell, William H.C. Roust, and Robert Cheevers) are listed as residents in city directories in the early to mid-1870s. While the 1870 U.S. Census does not list addresses, there is also a policeman named William Moore listed in the vicinity of the address in that year. It is likely that all of these men served for the Metropolitan Police, the integrated police force that was responsible for security in the city during Reconstruction and was aligned with the Republican government. This seemed to suggest a connection with both the armaments and the pipe depicting Grant, a Republican leader unpopular with the former Confederates who had attempted to regain political power in New Orleans.

However, as archaeologists located other features on the block, and the map further refined as a result, they determined that the privy was more likely to be located at the rear property line of the 346/1307 S. Liberty Street address. Occupation of this property was much more stable in the period in question, with a widow named Mary Wilson owning and residing at the property for over 40 years. Sharing the house with her was a large extended family, typically including a number of her own children, along with her married daughter Elizabeth and son-in-law Emile Legien, and, eventually their children. In 1880 Census (the census nearest in time to the assemblage recovered, listed Wilson as a milliner and Emile as a plasterer. Many of Wilson’s sons went on to work as carpenters, while daughter Kate worked as a teacher. Many of the archaeological items recovered also suggest that a large family occupied the space, with a particularly rich array of items relating to toys and play, hygiene and health, and personal adornment in the assemblage.

The artifacts recovered are illustrated in more detail below. They provide no ‘smoking gun’ as to which household was responsible for the items in the privy, and ultimately, there may be no singular solution. The image descriptions present some hypothetical scenarios based on what is known from city directories, census records, and the artifacts themselves; the reader is invited to speculate as to what this combination of items meant for a household in New Orleans at the end of Reconstruction.

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In the Colonial Era, the area that eventually became the Melpomene neighborhood and later utilized for the Guste Homes was located in a low-lying backswamp zone at the rear of the Livaudais plantation tract, straddling land that became the Faubourgs Annunciation and de la Course in the first half of the nineteenth century. While developers first surveyed these tracts for subdivision in 1836, there seems to have been little development within them until after the completion of the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad in 1853, with its rail yard near the project area at Calliope Street between Magnolia and Claiborne Streets. Areas along what was then the undeveloped edge of the city attracted working class immigrants and socially marginalized people, like Elizabeth Boyd, a free woman of color living on Howard/LaSalle Street in City Square 358 in 1860.

During the 2013 excavation of the Melpomene neighborhood, archaeologists did not find any material evidence of the indigenous peoples who lived in southeast Louisiana prior to colonial settlement. In urban settings, the density of later occupation typically obliterates such earlier deposits, even when archaeologists are able to specifically target where they might be located. Some of the architectural remains documented likely date to the first nineteenth century structures built on urban lots, but otherwise little evidence remained archaeologically of this earlier era of historic-period pre-Civil War development, as was the case at the address associated with Elizabeth Boyd.

The Melpomene neighborhood became much more densely developed after the Civil War. After Emancipation, freedmen and women moved to the city to escape the violent exploitation of plantation life, joining poor immigrants on the urban fringe. During Reconstruction (1867-1877) in Louisiana, federal occupation created new hopes for citizenship and political rights for the state’s Black residents. Eventually, this triggered a violent backlash from white supremacist forces, culminating in the so-called “Battle of Liberty Place”, which restored former Confederate elites to power. Archaeological assemblages that adequately reflect the turbulence of these years are rare, but one of the most unusual deposits uncovered in the Melpomene neighborhood likely gives a glimpse of daily life in the era.

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In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many of the people who lived in the Melpomene neighborhood of Central City rented their residences with some addresses seeing rapid turnover. Even though people filled features like privy shafts rapidly (so that the date of the filling episode can be dated to within a few years), the neighborhood’s high resident turnover can make connecting archaeological assemblages to specific families tricky. This is the case at 1304 Howard Street in Square 350, the block historically bounded by Erato, LaSalle (or Howard), Thalia, and South Liberty Streets. In 2013, archaeologists excavated a large wood-lined privy shaft near what would have been the rear property line of the address. While most of the material within it dated to the end of the nineteenth century, it was probably filled in the early 1900s, perhaps as late as 1910.

The U.S Census enumerated a laborer named Leo LeBlanc living there in 1900 with his wife and two children; a year later, the City Directory lists them as still there, along with a laborer named Paul Manuel. The directories list at least three other residents at the address between 1902 and 1909. When the census came again in 1910, a large and complex household of renters were enumerated at the address, including William Smith, a laborer identified as Black, and his wife Virginia, a washerwoman, identified as Mulatto; another woman named Mattie Hawkins, and her teenage sons, both laborers (at a wharf and a lumber yard), all identified as Mulatto; and a lodger named Lem Diggins, also a laborer at a lumber yard. One can speculate about the connections that brought this household together: perhaps Hawkins was part of Virginia’s extended family, while one can also guess that Diggins worked with her son at the lumber yard. Such networks of extended family and friends were vital for sustaining Black families in the era. By 1912, the occupants of the address shifted again.

Who then was responsible for the artifacts within the wood-lined privy at 1304 Howard Street? It contained a rich assemblage of materials: large quantities of ceramic tablewares, in a variety of forms (plates, saucers, cups, bowls, and serving vessels), vessels for hygiene like wash basins and chamber pots, bottles from medicines, perfumes, soda and mineral waters, bitters and schnapps, perfumes, foods, and alcoholic beverages, glass tablewares, lamp parts, tools, cutlery, and numerous small personal items, like buttons, smoking pipe fragments, hair combs, and items of jewelry. Occasional highly distinctive items may give hints about the identity of the occupants, like the images featured below.

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By the early 1900s, the Melpomene neighborhood in Central City was a densely populated urban neighborhood, where many residents worked in occupations related to shipping, particularly in the nearby rail yards. Broadly speaking, the area was home predominantly to working class immigrants of European descent in the period between Reconstruction and the end of the nineteenth century, with the neighborhood gradually becoming a predominantly Black neighborhood in the first decades of the twentieth century. The demographic changes in the neighborhood can be tracked in documentary records like the census and city directories, which provide information at the address level about residents’ race and ethnicity, household composition, occupations, and property ownership.

Larger-scale political events always loomed in the background of neighborhoods with such racially integrated patterns of residence. The period after Reconstruction was a particularly turbulent one, as the city’s Black residents found opportunities for social advancement subverted and blocked. Black voter registration in Louisiana had reached a high of 128,150 by 1888, but white supremacists attacked their rights on all fronts. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision legalized segregation, and the new Louisiana Constitution of 1898 distinguished the right of citizenship from the “privilege” of the vote, using this language to disenfranchise Black voters. By the next year, Black voter registration plummeted to just over 12,000; by 1930, there were just over 2,000 Black voters left in the entire state. White supremacists segregated schools and public facilities, attacked biracial labor organizations, and used extralegal violence like lynching to reinforce state-sanctioned oppression.

Archaeological assemblages can only indirectly illustrate such widespread changes, but they do help explore the individual strategies that working class families employed to live and, in some cases, to prosper, even in the face of considerable adversity. They also help us to understand how people experienced such broad changes at an everyday level: in foodways and diet, in health, in childcare, in social interactions, and in recreation, as displayed through consumer behaviors.

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In 2013, archaeological firms conducted test excavations in City Square 383 in the Melpomene neighborhood, the city block once bounded by Erato, Freret, Thalia, and South Robertson (or Locust) Streets. Testing focused on lots along the former corner of South Robertson and Erato Streets, where archaeologists identified a number of brick building foundations and midden (domestic waste) deposits. In 1895, the construction of a double house at 1300-1302 South Robertson Street replaced an earlier frame dwelling. This structure would eventually function as a combination business and residence, variously identified as a corner grocery, saloon, barber shop, soft drink establishment (as it was called after Prohibition), retail liquor business, and barroom over some five decades. A man named Saverio (Americanized to Sam or Jim) Salvaggio served as the longest tenured proprietor of this shop, and at least some of the archaeological material recovered from the address is likely related to his family’s tenure at the location from around 1905 until 1925.

Both Sam and his wife Josephine (born Giuseppa) arrived in the United States from Bisacquino, Sicily in the latter part of the 1880s, just before the infamous 1891 lynching of eleven Italian men by a mob angered over the murder of a New Orleans police chief. This violent episode, which became an international scandal, must have affected the Salvaggio’s sense of security in their new country. In 1883, Sam and Josephine married and in 1902 Sam naturalized his status as a United States citizen. A man named Hillary M. Nugent served as the witness in Sam’s naturalization. This is presumably the same Hillary Nugent listed as the owner of the 1300-1302 South Robertson Street property in 1900, an Irish-born clerk living there with his wife and four children. Nugent sold the property to Sam Salvaggio in 1908, but apparently Sam already participated in the business there in 1903, when a short blurb in the Daily Picayune mentions the results of a pool tournament at “Salvaggio’s,” identified as being on that corner.

According to the 1910 Census, Sam Salvaggio lived at the address with Josephine, their three children, and Josephine’s mother. All of these people still resided there in 1920, although daughter Virginia, now an adult herself, had married Leo Conners. Virginia continued to live at 1300-1302 South Robertson Street, along with Leo and a four-month-old infant, while the Salvaggios had added another daughter themselves.

Sam Salvaggio ran afoul of the city’s increasing attempts to segregate social spaces in 1908, when the City cited him for violating the ‘Gay-Shattuck’ law, which mandated that saloons and bars be racially segregated. Italian immigrants found themselves in a difficult situation in regard to segregation, as racist ideologues and anti-immigrant activists sought to cast doubt on the ‘whiteness’ of people from southern and eastern Europe and stigmatize them as criminals.

As for many operators of saloons and barrooms, the federal prohibition of alcohol also created legal and financial problems for the Salvaggios. Many bar owners tried to circumvent the new legislation. The City fined “Savario Salvaggio” $50 for violations of the “Federal Dry Law,” and a 1924 account of an arrest describes Frank Salvaggio, Sam’s son, as a “two-timer” for liquor-related crimes. In 1929, the police arrested Frank Salvaggio and Vincent Puleo, husband of Salvaggio’s daughter Mary, in connection with the discovery of a 75 gallon still.

Perhaps these legal troubles (and the difficulty of operating a ‘soda’ vending establishment profitably) caused Sam to give up the business on South Robertson. Sam is last associated with the property in 1925. Sam Salvaggio died in 1929, survived by Josephine Salvaggio who died in 1957, while their family thrived in the city’s growing civically active Italian American community.

The images below illustrate a number of archaeological findings from this site that tell us more about the Salvaggio family’s time living in the Melpomene neighborhood.

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In working class neighborhoods like the Melpomene in Central City, the importance of women’s labor in the household’s economy is visible both in historical records and archaeological materials. Women worked as dress makers, cooks, and laundresses. Their work financially sustained households, especially in times of labor instability.

From 1900 to 1930, Black men living in the Melpomene neighborhood found jobs around the nearby railyards, though this period saw a general shift away from higher paying skillful or union jobs and towards unorganized labor or service work. This shift played a part in a concerted effort by business and industry to marginalize Black workers and subvert biracial labor cooperation, a campaign that continued throughout the twentieth century.

After 1900, Black residents made up an increasing proportion of the Melpomene neighborhood. However, it provided a frequent home for immigrants who found themselves at the margins of white society, especially those considered non-white in the two-tiered racial hierarchy of the segregated South. Chinese immigrant Sue Wah operated a laundry at 1233 South Liberty Street from 1900-1908. The late-nineteenth century saw large-scale immigration from Sicily and from Eastern Europe. Archaeological artifacts found at the corner of South Robertson and Erato Streets, indicate that the Salvaggios, a Sicilian American family, lived there in the early 1900s.

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In 2013, archaeological consulting firm Earth Search, Inc., excavated a block of the Melpomene neighborhood originally bounded by South Liberty, Erato, Clio, and Howard/LaSalle Streets. Earth Search identified brick foundations and artifacts from a number of different addresses across this particular block. The most informative materials recovered came from a wood-lined privy shaft located along a property line between two homes at 1220 and 1222-1224 Howard/La Salle Street. Archaeological findings suggest that the privy was filled during the 1930s, presumably representing a cleaning episode linked to a family moving from the house or a change in ownership. Glass bottles and containers, many of them intact, filled the privy along with a smaller collection of ceramic tablewares, personal items, and butchered animal bones.

The 1930 Census recorded a woman named Minnie Puckett as the owner of 1222 Howard Street. The Census described Minnie Puckett as a 49-year-old “Negro” widow, born in Mississippi to parents from Virginia. The Census valued the home, where she resided with her 13-year-old granddaughter, at $4400. Minnie Puckett’s thirty-year-old daughter, Lucille Puckett, rented the other side of the house. Also born in Mississippi, Lucille Puckett lived with her four daughters: Edna (10), Helen (8), Genieve (5), and Minnie (3), named for her grandmother. Minnie Puckett resided at this house until her death, after which the house appears in an advertisement for a property seizure and auction by the Civil Sheriff in 1937. By the time of the 1940 Census, the Puckett family no longer owned 1222 Howard Street. The Pucketts’ departure from the house seems like the sort of life event that caused the filling of the privy.

The archaeological assemblage from the privy gives us a small glimpse of everyday life in the household, and of the hopes and obstacles faced by Black families of this generation. The images below illustrate and describe some of the objects found in the Puckett family privy.

The Puckett family’s story epitomizes the aspirations of Black migrants to New Orleans in the early twentieth century, but it also shows the precarity of their position in a segregated society in which oppressive forces devalued their labor and sabotaged their chances of property ownership. The Pucketts moved to New Orleans from Mississippi by 1920, when both Minnie and Lucille lived at 2605 Calliope Street. Minnie was already widowed and working as a laundress. Lucille’s husband, Eddie Carr, a laborer from Alabama, and Andrew Puckett, Minnie’s son working as a brakeman on the railroad, also resided with Minnie and Lucille on Calliope Street.

It must have taken considerable hard work for the family to purchase the property on Howard Street, particularly after the death of Andrew Puckett in 1920. Legal problems surrounded Andrew’s succession, trapping Lucille in litigation issues until the late 1920s. The loss of the property must have been a devastating blow to Lucille and her family.

Of course, the Puckett family’s dreams didn’t end at the moment in time captured by the archaeological assemblage at 1222 Howard Street. Lucille’s children grew up and had families of their own, eventually moving into the Calliope Housing Project nearby. The story of the house lost at 1222 Howard Street passed through family generations as a lesson in being careful in business and personal affairs, and a warning to not be taken advantage of. Lucille’s family remembers her tough and hard-working character, taking on extra jobs to provide more for her family. She insisted that they shouldn’t be content with their lot and should strive for better. Her daughter inherited some of her tastes for fine china and elegant petticoats, symbols of affluence in a racist society structured to keep them as second-class citizens. Many of Minnie’s descendants still reside in New Orleans and saved photos of Minnie, Andrew, and Lucille that they shared with researchers for this project.

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Between the 1930s and 1960s, racist policies at every level of government pushed Black residents of New Orleans into lower-paying jobs and racially segregated neighborhoods. Throughout the nation, local and federal government agencies used coded terms like urban renewal, racial covenants, and red-lining to describe their efforts to segregate housing and homeownership. These policies limited possibilities for Black residents to achieve independence, financial security, and other opportunities for their families.

Of course, Black New Orleanians worked to resist and counter the effects of structural racism in whatever ways they could. The written historical record gives glimpses of individual families who tried to use homeownership as a foothold on economic security in the Melpomene neighborhood. Segregation in an urban setting also provided avenues for prosperity with the formation of businesses catering to Black customers that white-owned businesses often excluded.

By engaging archaeological artifacts excavated from the Guste Homes site in 2004, alongside the written historical record that documents the lives of families who lived in the Melpomene neighborhood prior to its 1961 demolition, we can gain a deeper understanding of residents’ lives.

For instance, Edward Shannon, first a renter at 1219-1221 Howard/LaSalle Streets, owned the property by 1930 while working as a superintendent for a life insurance company. He later opened a furniture repair business at the same location. Another home at 1216 Freret was owned by a series of railroad porters in the period from 1920-1940, while, in 1926, a Black family of Puerto Rican descent headed by Jose Fuentes purchased a home at 2317 Erato and lived there through 1949.

It is often a mixture of luck and circumstance when a particular household is represented in the archaeological record of a neighborhood, and sometimes it can be very difficult to link material remains with specific families. However, the Puckett family at 1222-1224 Howard/LaSalle can be traced in both documents and in the objects they left behind in a privy shaft, apparently filled when they moved out in the 1930s.

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In 1964, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans published the results of “A Survey of the Recreational, Social, and Economic Conditions of the Negro Population of the William S. Guste, Sr., Homes and the Adjacent Areas.” The Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) recently opened the Guste Homes and housed a population of 2,443 residents, not including the high-rise home for elderly residents that made up a part of the project. Many saw such housing projects as an important first step in addressing the needs of low-income residents of the City. However, the report recognized that housing covered only one aspect of neighborhood revitalization; of those 2,443 residents, 1,731 were young people, and the report emphasizes that for them “recreational and cultural opportunities in the area [were] woefully inadequate.”

Surveys like the one produced by the Urban League can give important glimpses into the demographics and social conditions in the neighborhoods that organizations identified as slums. In the seven tracts of the census considered part of the Guste area (roughly the blocks bounded by Dryades, Claiborne, First, and Calliope Streets, encompassing the Guste Homes and the adjacent areas) the overall population consisted of 28,293 people, 77% of whom the census classified as “Negro.” Streets other than major thoroughfares were unpaved, inadequately lit, and “cluttered with debris.” The survey deemed the tenement buildings adjacent to Guste Homes occupied by renters as “overcrowded and hazardous.” According to the survey, a woman with a family of seven children complained of rats almost as big as cats in the Melpomene neighborhood, saying that several of her children had been bitten and that the rodents occasionally invaded her broken ice box.

Of 103 households the Urban League surveyed in detail, only 29 had lived in New Orleans all their lives. Many of those living in the Melpomene neighborhood recently transplanted to the city from rural parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, and felt isolated from social life and economic opportunities in the city. Ironically, many cited the improved educational opportunities for their children as a reason to move to the city, but the two schools that served Black children in the neighborhood, McDonough No. 36 and No. 38, were so overcrowded that students attended in what was called the “platoon system,” splitting the student body into two groups, each attending only half a day, switching over at lunch time. For working parents, this was a hardship, and many residents complained about the adverse effects the lack of childcare facilities and community centers had on young people in the neighborhood.

Naturally, residents were not happy about these conditions. Tenants complained about the conditions of housing and their inability to get absentee landlords to make needed repairs, though the survey noted that the few owner-occupied properties showed “care and pride” in their upkeep. Many renters felt that landlords overcharged for rent, creating cycles of poverty from which it was almost impossible to escape.

Underlying all of this was segregation and structural inequality. A racist social, political, and economic structure -- meant to keep Black residents of the city in permanent second class citizenship -- limited their choices about where to live, where to work, where to go to school, and even where to shop and socialize. Soon enough, the Guste area would become one of many centers of organizing for the Civil Rights struggle in New Orleans. But the inequalities within it were not inevitable. The Melpomene neighborhood that became the Guste Homes was always a site of struggle for residents of the city, and we can trace those struggles over generations of change in the neighborhood.

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According to the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act, any time a federal agency does something that could affect historic resources, it must take into account the effects of those actions. In the case of archaeology, this typically means documenting sites and artifacts before they are disturbed or destroyed.

Many federal agencies took part in the redevelopment of the Guste Homes, a public housing project located in the New Orleans Central City neighborhood. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administered the project through the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) because the federal government owns the land. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provided some of the funds for the redevelopment. Two local archaeological firms, R.C. Goodwin and Associates and Earth Search, Inc., conducted tests to see the history preserved in the blocks where Guste Homes once stood. These archaeological firms targeted specific areas for excavation that had the most potential to tell us things about the history of the Melpomene neighborhood that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to know.

Before HANO completed the construction of the Guste Homes development in 1964, the Melpomene neighborhood it replaced looked much like the rest of the Central City area, with densely packed houses, corner stores, and other small businesses. When HANO demolished those buildings to make way for the Guste project buildings, old building foundations and footings remained below ground. Most importantly for archaeologists, pits that had previously been dug into the ground, like wells and old outhouse pits, were covered over. Before regular trash pick-up, an abandoned hole in the ground provided a convenient place to get rid of household refuse, like broken dishes, bottles, food remains, and all sorts of small everyday items. These holes become like time capsules, which, once excavated by archaeologists, potentially tell about the everyday lives of the people who once lived in the area.

In archaeology, as you dig downwards, you go back in time: the things that are on top are the newest and the ones that are more deeply buried are older. Archaeologists (and geologists) call this “the law of stratigraphic superposition.” In this tour, we will go back in time starting in 1964, when the Guste Homes opened, and focus on a few families who lived in the area over the previous hundred years.

From a combination of documentary sources and maps, we can trace the development of the Melpomene neighborhood in some detail over this period. Some of those who lived in the area left more traces than others in documents, but all of those discussed left material remains, or artifacts, recovered through archaeology. These artifacts allow us to get glimpses of the daily lives of the city’s residents in a way that other historical documents can’t.

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In 1961, the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) announced plans to construct the William J. Guste, Sr. Homes, named for the Housing Authority’s long-time general counsel. The 1961 Report of the Housing Authority of New Orleans declared:

“The project will consist of 993 dwelling units replacing ten squares of rock bottom slums where 500 negro families have been living in substandard housing. The Housing Authority is dedicated to the eradication of slums in New Orleans. Slums are a breeding place for crime and disease. To remove this slum is a great step forward for our City… it will not only remove this cancer from the heart of our City, but will improve the entire area.”

The proposed new construction included housing for elderly people, a first in the city, comprising a 12-story high rise building in a cruciform pattern containing 528 apartments. HANO presented the design for the Guste Homes as innovative, addressing some of the issues experienced by residents at other housing projects in the city. HANO was particularly proud of the attention given to plans for the exterior areas of the Guste Homes:

“Ten once-shabby squares in the congested heart of this old Creole Metropolis –before 1962 is over—will prove, in a test-tube of better living, that in this New Orleans area Nature, with her trees and vines and shrubs and bulbs, makes by far the most beautiful, the most versatile and useful of structural materials at the command of imaginative architects.” [Wilson Callender, “Horticultural Aspects of the William J. Guste Sr. Homes,” 1961 HANO Report, pg. 44]

The language used to describe the placement of Guste Homes was typical of the era. Since the 1930s, “slum clearance” served as a central feature of efforts to alter housing in American cities, often as a part of what would soon be termed “urban renewal” projects. Local and federal governments often targeted Black working class neighborhoods for clearance.

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Big Oak Island and Little Oak Island are camps and habitation sites associated with the people of the Tchefuncte culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley, dating from as early as 800 BCE to as late as AD 200. The sites are located in the marshes of eastern New Orleans in the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge.

The sites were first investigated in 1939 when a team of archaeologists with the Works Progress Administration excavated the remains of a large shell midden at Big Oak Island composed of small Rangia clamshells as well as pieces of pottery, clay pipes, stone and bone tools, and human burials. The artifacts found at Big Oak Island were re-analyzed in 1945 by James A. Ford and George I. Quimby. Taken with similar artifacts from other prehistoric sites around the Lake Pontchartrain Basin, Ford and Quimby suggested that the Tchefuncte culture emerged from the late Poverty Point culture between 800 and 700 B.C. in the Lower Mississippi Valley and developed into what is termed the Marksville culture by 200 A.D.  

Additional archaeological digs led by University of New Orleans (UNO) anthropologist J. Richard Shenkel began in the Summer of 1972. Shenkel noted two principal site types in the eastern New Orleans marsh. One type of site, exemplified by Big Oak Island, consisted of large shell middens that resulted from seafood processing. The other site type, as at Little Oak Island, was a village or base camp consisting of an earthen midden and postholes indicative of the presence of structures. Big Oak and Little Oak Islands are two of what were once many Tchefuncte sites around the edges of Lake Pontchartrain. The Tchefuncte were hunters, fishers, and gatherers who lived in small villages centered in eastern Louisiana and stretching along the coast to west Mississippi and southeast Texas. They were also one of the first Native cultures of southeastern Louisiana to intensively produce pottery, with a remarkable range of decorative motifs.

When Dr. Shenkel and the students of UNO archeology summer program started digging in the early 1970s, the fate of Big Oak and Little Oak Islands was far from certain. The prehistoric sites were part of a large tract of land in private ownership that was slated for development. An ad hoc committee of concerned citizens formed to have Big Oak Island and Little Oak Islands placed on the National Register of Historic Places. They were successfully added in 1971. The aim of further research into Big and Little Oak Islands was to preserve the land as part of the Jean Lafitte National Historic Park. Under the Emergency Wetlands Act of 1986, Big Oak and Little Oak Islands came under the protection of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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The excavations at the Cabildo represented a rare opportunity to recover archaeological evidence of Colonial era governance, particularly in the realm of punishment. Modern conceptions of the prison as a place of confinement and correction were still developing in this era, and serious offenses were likely to be considered a direct affront to the sovereign, and thus to be punished corporally. The evidence from the Cabildo suggests that, even at a comparatively early date, prison labor was being exploited in manufacturing, a pattern that would be developed through the nineteenth century and into the modern era. It shows the poor sanitation within the prison, but it also demonstrates the ways in which those confined maintained some degree of autonomy within those conditions.

Today, the Cabildo is a facility of the Louisiana State Museum, but the courtyard of the Cabildo was the location of a city prison complex for nearly two hundred years, across French, Spanish, and American rule. Constructed in 1730, the prison and police station were some of the city’s earliest administrative structures. In 1769, following the transition from French to Spanish rule, Spanish officials demolished the existing structure and built a Cabildo, or town hall: a complex with a military prison, a civil prison, police station, jailer’s quarters, and government chambers. The Great Fire of 1788 damaged this Cabildo and another fire in 1794 destroyed other parts of the complex. In 1799, the second Cabildo was completed, and this is the structure you see today.

In the early 1830s, the City Council authorized plans for enlarging the prison to deal with its notorious overcrowding, but the city also built a new Orleans Parish Prison behind what is today the Municipal Auditorium near Louis Armstrong Park. After the construction of the new prison finished in 1839, the old prison was abandoned and subsequently torn down. Throughout the Spanish and American periods of its operation, government officials and visitors commented on the poor condition of the facility, from lack of food and clothing to rat infestations.

In May of 1988, the third story of the Cabildo, by then a part of the Louisiana State Museum, caught fire. Following the fire, the museum hired Earth Search, Inc., led by Dr. Jill-Karen Yakubik, to excavate the Cabildo courtyard prior to the construction of a new water line in the vicinity.

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Today, the Cabildo is a facility of the Louisiana State Museum, but the courtyard of the Cabildo was the location of a city prison complex for nearly two hundred years, across French, Spanish, and American rule. Constructed in 1730, the prison and police station were some of the city’s earliest administrative structures. In 1769, following the transition from French to Spanish rule, Spanish officials demolished the existing structure and built a Cabildo, or town hall: a complex with a military prison, a civil prison, police station, jailer’s quarters, and government chambers. The Great Fire of 1788 damaged this Cabildo and another fire in 1794 destroyed other parts of the complex. In 1799, the second Cabildo was completed, and this is the structure you see today.

In the early 1830s, the City Council authorized plans for enlarging the prison to deal with its notorious overcrowding, but the city also built a new Orleans Parish Prison behind what is today the Municipal Auditorium near Louis Armstrong Park. After the construction of the new prison finished in 1839, the old prison was abandoned and subsequently torn down. Throughout the Spanish and American periods of its operation, government officials and visitors commented on the poor condition of the facility, from lack of food and clothing to rat infestations.

In May of 1988, the third story of the Cabildo, by then a part of the Louisiana State Museum, caught fire. Following the fire, the museum hired Earth Search, Inc., led by Dr. Jill-Karen Yakubik, to excavate the Cabildo courtyard prior to the construction of a new water line in the vicinity.

For more information about archeaology at The Cabildo, please visit the Archaeology of the Cabildo tour.

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On October 22, 2014, an over-200-year-old building at 810 Royal Street collapsed, presumably a victim of unrepaired termite and moisture damage. The collapse sparked conversations in New Orleans about the importance of historic preservation. The complex of buildings at the corner of Royal and St. Ann was constructed by Don Francisco Balthazar Languille sometime soon after his purchase of the lots in 1801.

The group of buildings, including the one that collapsed at 808-810 Royal, and the extant ones at 800-806 Royal and 635-637 St. Ann Street, are reputed to have been among the first 3-story residential structures in the Vieux Carré. The loss of such an important part of the built landscape in the heart of the Quarter through what many saw as ‘demolition by neglect’ highlighted the fragile nature of the city’s architectural heritage, even in its most tightly-regulated district.

The collapse also offered a rare opportunity to access the layers of soil beneath the building, ground that had been essentially undisturbed since 1801. The new owners offered University of New Orleans Anthropology professor Ryan Gray and his students access to the site while awaiting permits for new construction. The artifacts found during two seasons of excavations conducted by UNO’s summer field school in archaeology have given important insights into life in the Colonial era city.

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In 1997, Dr. Shannon Dawdy directed the second series of excavations at Madame John’s Legacy under the auspices of the Greater New Orleans Archaeological Program, a state program then based at the University of New Orleans. These investigations focused entirely upon areas e exterior of the primary structure and planned to mitigate impacts to archaeological resources in the rear courtyard associated with the installation of a new air conditioning system. This project was planned in part to comply with Louisiana’s Archaeological Resources Act (R.S. 41:1606), which mandates that significant archaeological remains on a state-owned property be considered during work that might negatively impact them.

Most of the images here are scanned from 35 mm slides taken for use in public presentations. In a very short period of time, digital photography has revolutionized the way that archaeologists can document objects recovered on excavations, in that now thousands of photographs of finds can be taken very quickly. However, at the same time, these innovations in photography generate new issues, as digital formats change rapidly, and the space to archive large bodies of data and guarantee that it is available in perpetuity itself can become a problem.

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During the Summer of 2013, a team from Tulane University and its Masters in Preservation Studies program undertook a long-term study of conservation issues at Madame John’s Legacy. This project was financed in part with federal funds from the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, through the Louisiana State Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, Office of Cultural Development, Division of Historic Preservation. Portions of the brick walls have undergone substantial deterioration, and the goal of the conservation effort was to determine the source of moisture and salts adversely affecting the brickwork on site. A number of techniques were utilized to this end, including infrared imagery, test coring of the walls, and the installation of sensors to monitor moisture at select locations in the walls. The results of the study can be found at madamejohnslegacy.wordpress.com.

The Tulane study integrated archaeological data as well. Ryan Gray of the UNO Department of Anthropology was engaged to assess the conditions of the foundations and to clear a location for installation of moisture monitors. A team of volunteers and students from UNO conducted excavations along three interior walls inside Madame John’s. Several features were documented, including remains of a French Colonial structure and a dense lens of debris from the 1788 fire, probably representing the ‘in situ’ collapse of the pre-1788 structure’s lower level.

Each of the projects added valuable context to the site’s history, and the level from the 1788 fire presents a vivid picture of the material culture of the DeLanzos household. Perhaps even more significantly, the spatial dimension of the data adds to the site’s story as well. DeLanzos and his wife were involved in numerous transactions involving the sale and purchase of enslaved individuals. By comparing the distribution of artifacts in the interior of the house at the time of the 1788 fire with those from the courtyard, more likely associated with the detached kitchen and presumed living area of those enslaved at Madame John’s (explored in Dawdy’s research), one may get a sense of the ways in which these social worlds were interlinked. The material remains and surviving documents serve as a reminder that slavery was not solely rural and plantation based; the labor and lives of the enslaved made the growth of the city possible.

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In 1971, Madame John’s Legacy was one of the first historic period sites in urban New Orleans to be systematically investigated, when the subdiscipline of historical archaeology was still in its relative infancy. These investigations, carried out by Richard Shenkel of the University of New Orleans, were primarily intended to help understand the construction chronology of Madame John’s. While it was known that the present incarnation of Madame John’s was constructed just after the 1788 fire had damaged or destroyed an existing structure on the lot, it was unclear whether or not this new construction was on the exact footprint of the older one. It was also unclear whether the building that was destroyed dated from the Spanish era, or whether it was the same one maintained by the Widow Pascal in the French era as an inn.

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