Colonial Williamsburg Digital Library

Introduction

Between April and July, 2000, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's Department of Archaeological Research (D.A.R.) conducted a Phase II assessment and Phase III archaeological data recovery within an approximately 231-square-meter portion of the parking lot located directly south of the present-day Williamsburg Movie Theater (Building 32-A). The Phase III excavations were designed to recover significant archaeological information previously identified during initial Phase II testing conducted in April 2000. The site boundary conformed to the area scheduled to be disturbed by the construction of an addition to the stage area of the theater.

Physical Setting

The project area lies within a parking facility located directly behind the Williamsburg Movie Theater. Both the theater and the parking lot are situated within "Block 15," which lies on the south side of Duke of Gloucester Street, between South Boundary Street to the west and Henry Street to the east. The entire block, currently owned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, is part of "Merchants Square" and is occupied by shops and restaurants catering to visitors to the Historic Area. The project area appears to be situated primarily within colonial lot 361. Portions of the project area may also extend east and west into the adjacent colonial lots 360 and 62 (Figures 1 and 2).

Historical Background

Previous Archaeology

Research Goals

Field Methods

Laboratory Methods

All artifacts recovered during the excavation were sent to the archaeology lab at the DAR for processing and analysis. Artifacts were washed, identified, and inventoried by context. Each context was assigned a terminus post quem (TPQ) date when possible. The TPQ date establishes the earliest date at which an archaeological layer, feature, or artifact assemblage could have been deposited. This date is always based on the artifact with the most recent initial date of manufacture. Artifacts were inventoried by ware type with all important functional and morphological characteristics noted. All the documentation and artifacts recovered during the excavation are stored at the D.A.R. Laboratory.

2000 Phase II Assessment

The excavation of Test Units 1-4 revealed a relatively consistent stratigraphic sequence across the south length of the Williamsburg Theater under the parking lot. Situated directly under the parking lot fill was a 2-5 cm (1-2 in.) thick layer of dark brown silt loam. Artifacts for the layer included a variety of nineteenth and early twentieth-century glass, ceramics, and iron. Within Test Unit 4, a layer of compacted crushed sand mortar and brick was discovered under the dark brown silt loam, but this destruction debris was absent from all other units.

Under the dark brown silt loam in Test Units 1-3, and under the mortar and brick layer in Test Unit 4, was a layer of brown sandy silt loam. Although the layer was identified in each of the four test units behind the theater, it was only excavated within Test Unit 3. The depth of the layer was 22 cm (9 in.) and was deposited directly over subsoil. Artifacts from the layer consisted of primarily small fragments of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century ceramics and nails, but small quantities of brick, glass, animal bone, and tobacco pipe stems were also recovered.

Test Unit 5 was unlike any of the other four units excavated as part of the Phase II testing. All the excavated soil was a mix of various modern fills and subsoil was identified at a depth of 44 cm (1.4 feet) below the sidewalk. Cutting through the fill was a modern utility trench which contained a modern (early twentieth-century) ceramic sewer line. A single small square feature was recorded in subsoil, along the east end of the test unit. The feature measured 10 cm (4 in.) in length and width and contained a dark brown silt loam. The feature was not excavated.

2000 Phase III Assessment
Nineteenth to Twentieth-Century Occupation

The majority of all archaeological evidence uncovered during the Phase III at the Williamsburg Movie Theater site was associated with the early nineteenth through early twentieth-century phase of occupation. Excavations exposed a house foundation with a 18 date of 1820 based on artifacts from the builder's trench. The brick foundation also incorporated six brick piers which served to support internal walls, four of which were revealed during the Phase III excavation. Associated with the house were three refuse pits, two possible outbuildings, an assortment of small garden features, two fence lines, and a linear trench.

Eighteenth-Century Occupation

Evidence of the eighteenth-century occupation of the area was exceedingly sparse. Excavations revealed a possible fence line, two pit features, a large posthole, and a linear trench, all of which were uncovered below the nineteenth-century component of the site. Only the fence line and one of the pit features produced artifacts by which an eighteenth-century TPQ date could be determined for the feature.

Figure 30. Plan view of Posthole 210.

Figure 31. Profile of Posthole 210.

Eighteenth-Century Butchery on Block 15
(The Post Office Site and the Firehouse Site)

Historical research uncovered two Williamsburg butchers who appear to be associated with the eighteenth-century activities at the Post Office and Firehouse sites. Benjamin Hanson was a free mulatto born around 1706 to a white servant named Mary Hanson and a mulatto slave named Dick. Both parents were in the employment of Robert Reade, who upon learning of the birth of Benjamin, summoned Mary to court for having an illegitimate mulatto child. However, the charge was later dismissed (York County Records). Hanson was identified as a butcher through his many documented court appearances beginning in 1736/7, and an advertisement for his services which appeared in the Virginia Gazette on October 24, 1745:

Any person, having good Grass Mutton or Beef to dispose of, or, any that they have a Mind to Stall, may meet with a very good Market for the same, by applying, in Time, to Benjamin Hanson, Butcher, and Grazier, living next door to Col. Custis's, in Williamsburg

According to the Virginia Gazette advertisement, Hanson's residence was next door to Colonel Custis (Figure 36). Block 4 is the likely location of his residence because east of the Custis property was a large ravine, currently the route of the Colonial Parkway, which would have hindered the placement of a house. If Hanson resided on Block 4, it was likely he occupied the Jones House, a structure predating the remains of the Public Hospital of 1773 (Figure 37). Noël Hume (1973) established that the house was erected in the late seventeenth century and ultimately burned ca. 1760 based on the TPQ date of artifacts recovered from the cellar fill. Within the cellar, a trench was uncovered which dated to ca. 1740 and contained wine bottle seals marked T JONES, indicating the property was owned or occupied by a T. Jones at some date prior to 1740. However, historical evidence indicates that Jones lived on the property in the early 1720s until he moved to Block 31, north of Prince George Street, following his marriage in 1725/6 (Noël Hume 1973). The Jones House is the only known structure to have existed in the area for the years Hanson was operating his grazing/butchery business.

Thus historical and archaeological evidence points to the Jones House as a probable location for the residence of Benjamin Hanson. Based on his newspaper advertisement, Hanson was living on the site by 1745, but it is possible he resided on the property even earlier as the first mention of him as a practicing butcher occurred in 1736. The death of Hanson in 1753/4 closely matches the ca. 1760 date established for the destruction of the house, indicating the structure burned shortly after Hanson's departure. Further clues of the Hanson occupation of the Jones House were provided by artifactual evidence which pointed to the house having fallen on hard times before it burned (Noël Hume 1973). The mid-eighteenth-century remains confirm that a person of lower status and wealth occupied the house, and Hanson's position as a poor butcher would not have afforded him access to high-quality goods.

If Hanson lived on Block 4, it is possible he was grazing and butchering livestock on Block 15 from ca. 1736 to 1753. Butchering remains found on Block 15 were deposited during the time Hanson was in operation.

The second butcher associated with Block 15 was William Cole, who purchased a portion of this block from Samuel Crawley in 1785 (Figure 38). Cole owned Lot O until his death around 1810, when his estate sold the property to William Bowden. The earliest mention of William Cole appeared in the account book of sadler and harness maker Alexander Craig on May 22, 1751. Cole was subsequently noted eleven more times in Craig's account book from 1761 to 1763. As animal hides are an obvious bi-product of the slaughtering process, it appears that Cole provided Craig with the raw materials from which his leather goods where produced. Another reference to William Cole was made in 1758 when he took over the book of debts for fellow butcher Thomas Wilkins (Walsh 1997). A final notation of a butcher named William Cole was found in the memorandum book of Thomas Griffin Peachy, who settled six accounts with Cole beginning in 1799 and ending in 1801. Whether the William Cole mentioned by Craig and Peachy was one and the same is questionable due to the length of time between the first reference in 1751 and the last in 1801. If they are the same man, and assuming Cole did not begin his trade until he was at least 18 years old, then Cole would have been born around 1733. Given the fact that Cole died sometime between his last recorded transaction in 1801 and the selling of his estate in 1810, his age at the time of death would have been approximately 68-77 years old. While it is possible that Cole was a practicing butcher for approximately 50 37 Figure 36. Map showing relationship between Hanson residence and Block 15. Figure 37. Map of Block 4 with Jones (Hanson) house and Public Hospital of 1773. 38 Figure 38. Frenchman's Map identifying Cole's Property on Lot O. years, it is more probable that at a certain age Cole may have relied solely on the labor of others, such as apprentices, to perform his butchering activities, thereby allowing him to conduct business for such an extended period of time. Another possibility is that there may have been a father/son tandem of butchers, both of whom were named William.

Both the historical and the archaeological record of Block 15 confirmed the use of the area as an eighteenth-century location for butchers to conduct their trade. The excavation of the Post Office site by Ivor Noël Hume in 1961 and the Firehouse site by Patricia Samford in 1983 identified three temporal components dating, respectively, to the early eighteenth century, the mid-eighteenth century, and to the late eighteenth through early nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-Century Butchery on Block 15
(Williamsburg Movie Theater Site)

Given the destruction of the James City County records in the Civil War, a search of the historical record failed to uncover the identity of the nineteenth-century butcher who lived and worked on this portion of Block 15. The various faunal remains recovered from Refuse Pits 19 and 48 displayed evidence of having been cleaved, sawn, or a combination of both. During the late eighteenth to early nineteenth-century butchering techniques shifted from the use of a chopping instrument, such as a cleaver or axe, to the use of saws. Butchering methods appeared to evolve as the marketing of meat became increasingly commercialized (Bowen 1990). From the seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century there was a progression of cuts from relatively complete long bones to much smaller pieces, or "individual" cuts of meat. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century animals were butchered in large cuts which were then sold to consumers. The cooks would continue the butchering process in the kitchen, using chopping tools like a cleaver or knife to break up the meat into smaller pieces (Bowen 1994).

Industrialization of food processing in the nineteenth century reduced the need for this home butchering as urban consumers came to be further removed from the production process. Specialized slaughter houses developed to manage the increasing number of animals needed to satisfy the growing demand of the commercial market. Individual butchers no longer killed the animals they handled; instead, they purchased whole or parts of the animal carcass and continued the butchery process at their place of business.

This type of secondary butchery is evident at the nineteenth-century Williamsburg Movie Theater site as certain body parts were absent. Unlike the large percentage of heads and feet recovered at the eighteenth-century Firehouse site, the low number of recovered head remains and the complete absence of hooves from the Williamsburg Theater site indicates the animals were not slaughtered on this portion of Block 15. It appears the butcher purchased partially processed beef carcasses (i.e., minus the heads and hooves) and continued to butcher the meat into smaller, individual cuts for the local market. Also recovered from the site were sheep and swine remains, with the majority representing shoulder cuts of meat. The presence of these cuts indicates the butcher, rather than acquiring the entire animal, was simply purchasing a shoulder of pork or mutton and processing it for local consumers.

Secondary butchering allowed nineteenth-century residents to purchase meat in individual cuts sawn to the size they desired much in the same manner as today. The faunal remains uncovered at the Williamsburg Movie Theater site displayed evidence of this shift to hand sawn butchery but also revealed the continued reliance on cutting tools such as cleavers.

Butchery Waste Disposal Patterns on Block 15

With the removal of urban consumers from the butchering process, there developed a heightened sensitivity to the smells and health hazards involved with the slaughter of animals and disposal of the waste. City records consistently indicate this growing concern as laws became more strict, limiting the location of slaughterhouses to outside the city limits and regulating how butchers could conduct their trade (Bowen 1990). The developing 41 nineteenth-century awareness of the health hazard of animal waste appears to be related to the changing manner of disposal of the faunal remains on Block 15.

During the early to mid eighteenth century it was customary to dispose of most trash by simply dumping it on the ground surface. Such a practice is apparent at the mid-eighteenth-century Firehouse site in which the butchery leftovers were discarded by simply scattering them on the ground.

By the mid nineteenth century, the disposal of butchery waste was much more of a concern as can be seen through the three refuse pits uncovered at the Williamsburg Movie Theater site. The presence of butchered bone in the refuse features displays an effort by the occupant to conceal the animal remains. The attributes of the features—small irregular-shaped pits with a low number of recovered artifacts—indicates they were dug specifically for the disposal of the butchery waste. The absence of bone in Refuse Pit 163 was due to the high level of lime within the feature. Lime may have been placed within the pit as a means of accelerating the decomposition process of the deposited waste materials.

Block 15 and Landscape Identity in Williamsburg

Both the archaeological and historical records provided evidence for the continued use of Block 15 as a base of operations for butchers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Williamsburg. The next logical question which must be investigated is why Block 15 was chosen as a viable location for the rather unpleasant particulars of the butchering process and how it continued to maintain this identity throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such an examination indicates that events in the early eighteenth century settlement of the city of Williamsburg had a direct impact on the later development and utilization of the block in the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century.

Rural/Urban Networks and Block 15

With the growth of Williamsburg in the early to mid-eighteenth century came the problem of food procurement for the town-dwelling families. As the community grew, the availability of town land for raising livestock diminished and most households became less and less self-sufficient. Urban demand for meat soon outdistanced the ability of residents to produce a surplus and it became necessary to formulate strategies in order to accommodate and take advantage of emerging urban needs. Such methods involved the increasing integration of rural areas into the urban market as a means of supplying the community with meat (Walsh 1997).

Crucial to the development of an rural-urban network was the creation of a provisioning system in which rural food and fuel production was transported to the urban community, processed by intermediaries, and distributed to consumers. With a decrease in self-sufficiency, there developed a social connection between town residents and the farmers in the countryside. However, as both rural production and urban consumption increased, markets and middlemen were required to process and distribute the ever-increasing volume of goods entering the town.

As a public market was a symbol of municipal action, a market in Williamsburg was an important part of the initial planning of the city. Governor Nicholson was given power to grant such a facility in 1699. Unlike the centralized commercial towns of New England, the town market was slow to take effect in Virginia because of the sparse population and 45 ample farmland in the early eighteenth century. By 1705, an act provided the trustees of Williamsburg with the power to enlarge the market place, but no market house is mentioned (Brown 1991). In 1710 and again in 1715, Governor Spotswood unsuccessfully proposed to appoint weekly markets in the town. However, by 1722 Williamsburg maintained two markets each week, once on Wednesday and once on Saturday. It was not until 1757 that there is evidence of a market house being constructed with a market being conducted six days a week, except on Sunday.

Only one in-depth description of the eighteenth-century market in Williamsburg has been identified and it consists of a rather derogatory diatribe of the affair in the Virginia Gazette by one "Timothy Telltruth":

In all well regulated cities and towns the utmost regard is paid to the health and circumstances of the inhabitants, by those in power enacting such laws as deter butchers, bakers, &c. from exposing any thing to sale but what is good in quality, and at a certain fixed rate. We of the good town of Williamsburg, metropolis of Virginia! have but too much reason to complain of being neglected in those particulars; for here meat for poverty not fit to eat, and sometimes almost spoiled, may hang in our market for hours, without any notice being taken of the venders of it; and any person may ask what price for his commodity that his conscience will allow him, which is generally exorbitant enough, especially on publick times, or when little meat is at market. And if a man has not got money enough to purchase a whole quarter of meat, the butcher generally demands a penny a pound extraordinary to cut it. In the same manner we are treated about all other provisions, the feller always taking advantage when in his power. In Norfolk, I have heard that the markets are so regulated there that good meat must only bear such a price as the Magistrates think reasonable; and the butcher is obliged to cut his meat upon a farthing a pound being paid more than he demands the quarter. An example worthy of imitation - And the bakers are suffered to make their bread of what weight they think proper, and to put such unwholesome ingredients into it, and bake it of such bad flower, as must be very prejudicial to the health of those who eat it. At this very juncture the bread they bake daily, and sell to the inhabitants, justly entitles them to the pillory, if they had their desserts. A good heavy fine, in all likelihood, would put a stop to their ubiquitous practices, so detrimental to the inhabitants…(Virginia Gazette, Purdie and Dixon, September 7, 1768).

Some aspects of the market may have improved by the end of the eighteenth century when in 1795, resident St. George Tucker noted how the market was neither regular nor well supplied but furnished excellent meat in season (Brown 1991). It appears the nineteenth-century view of the market in Williamsburg was also a positive one. In 1857, a local newspaper described, "…the dead meats we there saw were very nice and tempting, sufficient to excite the palate of the most luxorious epicure" (Ewing 1857) .

Public markets were the direct urban symbols of local agricultural productivity and town growth (Walsh 1997). They provided a control to ensure that food moved from producer to consumer in a timely fashion so as to provide quality goods. The market was frequented by a wide-range of urban society due to its location in a highly visible and public part of town. The Williamsburg Market Square was located near the courthouse and public magazine (see Figure 40). It provided a venue for urban consumers to purchase meat and other produce from butchers and other vendors.

Middlemen such as Benjamin Hanson and William Cole established commercial butchering enterprises in Williamsburg to purchase rural livestock which they then processed and sold to the urban community. Butchers played key roles in the ever-growing rural-urban 46 market network as they transformed the unprocessed commodity of livestock into individual cuts which could then be sold to consumers at the local market. However, it is important to note that as middlemen, butchers were not fully integrated into either the rural or urban side of the network. Butchers needed to locate their operations close to the community in order to sell their meat at the market and yet remain at a location suitable for farmers to distribute livestock for processing. Butchering operations were therefore typically situated at town edges, which not only provided a convenient distribution point, but also kept the rather unpleasant particulars of the butchery process from the sensibilities of the urban residents. Town regulations in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, such as those in place at Williamsburg and Norfolk, were careful to forbid butchering within the marketplace (Walsh 1997).

Just as butchers served as the intermediary between the rural producer and the urban consumer, Block 15 served as an intermediary between the rural and urban landscape. Given its semi-rural character located on the western edge of Williamsburg, Block 15 functioned as a rural to urban transition zone between the surrounding plantations and the more cosmopolitan eastern end of Williamsburg. The property allowed butchers such as Hanson and Cole a suitable location to process and distribute meat to the market, while maintaining an acceptable distance from the community. Later butchers, such as the unknown craftsmen at the Williamsburg Movie Theater site, continued to utilize the benefits of Block 15 into the early to mid-nineteenth century.

Introduction

Among the discoveries from the excavations conducted at the Williamsburg Movie Theater site was a collection of 3279 animal bones from two pits associated with a post-1820s domestic structure, about whose occupants nothing is known. Joanne Bowen and Stephen Atkins, zooarchaeologists studying the bones, quickly noticed that the assemblage did not look like that from a domestic site. For one thing, the artifact lists from the pits did not contain the typical assortment of trash associated with a domestic occupation; there were very few artifacts at all found in the pits with the bones, a highly unusual occurrence. Trash pits dug to house the garbage from a household do just that—they are filled not only with bone, but with broken and unwanted goods such as bottles, dishes, and other domestic debris as well. These pits contained little other than tightly packed bone, appearing as if they were dug solely for the purpose of disposing that material.

The recovery of "just bones" sent up a signal to examine those bones much more closely, because lack of artifacts was not the only odd thing about the assemblage. The bones themselves possessed some curious qualities, seeming to represent only three species: cattle, pigs, and sheep. This combination of animals is common; the discovery of them unaccompanied by other food species is not. Domestic sites ordinarily have the remains of domestic birds, wild birds and mammals, fish, and turtles, as well as domestic mammals. In addition, a large number of the bones showed butcher's marks, both hacking and sawing, the latter a nineteenth-century innovation indicative of increased commercialization in meat marketing.

The combination of characteristics described above led archaeologists to speculate that the pits contained the refuse not from a household, but from a butcher's operation. This conjecture was strengthened by evidence from archaeological and documentary investigations conducted on Block 15 in the 1960s (at the old Post Office site) and the 1980s (at the Firehouse site), which suggested that Block 15 had been the home and/or workspace for butchers through the middle and late eighteenth century. Block 15 was an intermediate area of colonial and nineteenth-century Williamsburg, not quite rural, but not entirely urban—an ideal location for a rather messy profession requiring contact with the country for its raw materials, and close interaction (but not too close, as ensured by increasing legal sanctions) with an urban area to distribute them. The finds at the Williamsburg Movie Theater appear to show that this trend continued into the nineteenth century as well.

The possibility that the occupant of the Williamsburg Movie Theater site was a butcher, and that the refuse in the pits was the detritus of this craft, presented a zooarchaeological opportunity. Other than the assemblage from the Firehouse site, no other butcher site has been explored in Williamsburg, or is known to have been analyzed in the Chesapeake region. In addition, the Williamsburg Movie Theater assemblage is the only known example of a possible nineteenth-century butcher to have been analyzed. While the food provisioning system in the Chesapeake has been extensively researched for the eighteenth century (Walsh et al. 1997), very little is known about how meat foods were produced, acquired, processed and cooked in the nineteenth century, a time period which saw major shifts in the performance and meaning of these actions (Bowen and Manning 1994). Discovery 54 of the faunal assemblage from the Williamsburg Movie Theater site provided a unique occasion to examine one possible aspect of this as-yet-poorly-understood system.

This study takes the first step in the quest for this knowledge: to ascertain, if possible, whether the bones from the Williamsburg Movie Theater site were indeed those from a butcher's enterprise. To accomplish this task, Colonial Williamsburg zooarchaeologists began a detailed analysis of the bones. Testing the assumption that the assemblage in question actually is refuse from a butcher's operation, however, given the relatively sparse documentary data relating to the nature of the site's occupation and use, was easier said than done. Since no butcher site from the nineteenth century was available, another way to isolate the characteristics of the Theater assemblage was sought. For this purpose, the mid-eighteenth-century Firehouse butcher's site was used to provide a comparison with a site of presumably the same type, although from an earlier time period. To determine if and how it differed from contemporary household faunal assemblages, the Theater assemblage also was contrasted with six early-to-mid nineteenth-century domestic sites from Williamsburg and environs. This combination of comparisons was thought to be able to define the nature of the Theater assemblage, and to make some preliminary statements about early nineteenth-century butchers' enterprises.

Comparisons were begun with the creation of hypotheses to be tested by the application of current theories about and measures of urbanization and its effect on faunal assemblages. Zooarchaeological studies of the establishment and growth of cities in Europe, the Near East, and North America have revealed patterns which, in general, are seen worldwide (Maltby 1979; Stein 1987; Zeder 1988; Crabtree 1990; Bowen 1992; Landon 1996). In brief, as human populations become more concentrated, the open spaces within towns necessary for households to raise their own livestock for food become restricted. Concurrently, rural areas surrounding the city react to the urban need for provisions by first selling excess produce in the city, then producing foodstuffs specifically for urban consumption. Middlemen, such as butchers or grocers, take on the role of procuring, processing, and distributing foods to urban dwellers. In addition, laws are commonly enacted limiting the location of noxious industries such as butchery, and the importation of their raw materials (animals or carcasses) and disposal of their waste products (bones and offal), as well as household disposal of the same.

Zooarchaeologists studying complex urban societies have isolated three measures by which the level of an assemblage's participation in an urban market economy could be ascertained: age ratio, species diversity, and element distribution comparisons. Walsh et al. (1997:68) summarize: "In an urban environment, age profiles from domesticated cattle, pigs, and sheep should show a mark of specialized forms of animal husbandry through the increased presence of younger livestock, hallmarks of a market economy. The variety and relative importance of different animals show whether markets and the decreasing availability of habitats suitable for wildlife constrained the availability of wild animals. Third, element distributions of the major domestic mammals demonstrate the restriction of certain portions of the carcass such as the heads and feet. Taken as a whole, these pieces of evidence provide a measure of the extent to which the provisioning system has become specialized."

Because we were interested in differentiating the remains of a butcher's operation from other types of assemblages in a society known to have had a specialized provisioning system, however, the use of age ratio comparisons was not considered appropriate for 55 this study, since there exists almost no comparative data from rural sites. This study must wait until more rural and urban nineteenth-century sites in this region have been excavated. At the same time, we believed that the other two measures of market participation, species diversity comparisons and element distribution analyses, would allow us to sort out differences between site types and give us the means to begin to recognize nineteenth-century butcher's sites.

We began our study of the sites in our data set with species diversity analysis. Zooarchaeologists looking to understand the nature and relationships of urban and rural domestic sites have often employed observation of the range of animal species utilized at a site. Elizabeth Reitz of the University of Georgia conducted a study of sixteen urban and rural sites from South Carolina and Georgia dating from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, which revealed a clear pattern of difference between the two (Reitz 1986a:55-56). In contrast to the rural sites, which likely were more self-supporting entities, the urban diet consisted of greater amounts of meat from domestic animals, including domestic birds, and wild species were much less frequently found in urban assemblages than in rural. Reitz concluded that urban diets seemingly were less diverse than rural ones, a trend she related to the dependence of urban consumers on market distribution systems to obtain their meat.

Nan Rothschild echoes Reitz's conclusions in her 1989 article comparing the diversity of species between highly urbanized New York City and Florida's less developed St. Augustine, showing again that urban domestic sites have less diversity of species than rural sites, especially for those inhabitants most dependent on the market for their subsistence (Rothschild 1989:92-93). She also proposes that "…the increasing participation of an urban community in a market economy, and an increasing reliance on specialist provisioners (butchers and commercial fishermen)… will lead to greater standardization in foods consumed and consequently lower diversity" (Rothschild 1989:93) . The spectrum of diversity seen in these studies and others (Zeder 1988; Bowen 1992; Landon 1996), with highly diverse rural diets on one end, and less diverse urban ones on the other, is hypothesized to extend to and include the faunal assemblages from the "specialist provisioners" mentioned by Rothschild, bumping the urban domestic sites to the center of the range. The refuse from a butcher's operation in an urbanized area should be, by the logic used above, the least diverse faunal assemblage seen in our comparisons, a prediction that was indeed borne out in the data (see below).

Element distribution analyses were conducted next on the sites in the study. However, selection of an appropriate technique for interpreting the butchery patterns seen at the Theater site was somewhat daunting. Prehistoric archaeologists have long employed intersite comparisons of faunal remains to explore issues of slaughter, transport, distribution, and exchange within hunter/gatherer societies. As Walsh et al. outline (1997:315), in order to explain the differential presence of some body parts over others, archaeologists have looked at bone density and resulting differential element preservation, some have looked at the differences in nutritional content of various bones, a number have focused on the meat vs. bone content in various cuts, and others have focused on efficiency as the main determining factor. These studies have tended to focus on either the weight of various cuts or ease of stripping the meat from the bone as being the determining factor of which bones get left at the hunting sites and which get transported back, or "schlepped," to the 56 base camp (White 1952; Perkins and Daly 1968; Yellen 1977; Binford 1978; Lyman 1979; Gifford 1981; Jones and Metcalfe 1988; O'Connell et al. 1988).

Historical archaeologists, too, have applied the techniques of element distribution analysis to explain the patterns of butchery found on more recent sites. Zooarchaeologists studying faunal assemblages from eighteenth-century urban and rural domestic sites have made use of a basic method popularized by Reitz (1986b) of comparing a site's ratios of head, body and foot skeletal elements to the proportion seen in a whole animal to isolate discrete patterns in these ratios. At sites which participate in an urban market economy, a preponderance of meaty body elements is seen, greatly outnumbering the presumably less desirable head and foot parts (Landon 1996:8; Walsh et al. 1997:73). Rural sites, in contrast, where animals are raised, slaughtered, and disposed of on site, show an element distribution approaching that of the normal ratio seen in the complete skeleton. This pattern is seen as well in studies conducted in New England (Bowen 1992) and in the Near East (Zeder 1988). Extending this model for our study, butchers' sites, as processor/distributor, not consumer, sites were hypothesized to possess mostly waste parts—heads and feet—a reversal of the pattern seen at urban domestic sites, the likely final destination of the missing fleshy parts.

Unfortunately, this expected pattern did not materialize for the sites looked at in this study. The Theater site and the domestic sites all shared a similar, almost indistinguishable profile. This rather unexpected result caused us to rethink our technique. We postulated that individual bone elements may not have been the most suitable measure for exploring differences between processor/distributor sites and those of consumers. A butcher would generally have sold parts of an animal as cuts of meat, not individual bones. So, we made use of an alternative working of element distributions, but this time studying meat cuts, not individual bones, in the hope of a more rewarding outcome.

Element distributions based on meat cuts have been often employed in studies attempting to determine the level of wealth or socioeconomic status of a site's occupants. Schulz and Gust (1983), for example, looked at the ratios of different cuts of beef found at a range of sites from late nineteenth-century Sacramento, among them a high-class hotel, saloons of varying distinction, and a prison. Using contemporary data about meat cuts and prices, they created a rank value of meats and found that, indeed, the establishments catering to wealthier, higher status clients had faunal assemblages containing the remains of pricier cuts of meat, and those entertaining lower-class patrons had correspondingly cheaper meat remains. Lyman (1987) elaborated on Schulz and Gust's method, but, hearkening back to the prehistorians, proposed that bones should be sorted into meat cuts ranked by greatest meat to bone ratios, creating more- and less-cost-efficient meat cuts. We felt that this type of method could be "tweaked" to our purposes, but, because of constraints imposed by availability of contemporary documentary information able to provide context, we had to accomplish this in two configurations: first, through the creation of a comparison between rankings of caprine and pig fore- and hindquarter elements; next, by looking at rank values of adult cattle meat cut percentages.

Contemporary accounts reveal that in the early nineteenth-century, the hindquarters of pigs and caprines were in greater demand and were considered more desirable than the forequarters. The relative prices of these pieces given by contemporary writers bear this out. Lydia Child, for example, urges economy-minded housewives to buy the forequarters of both animals "for economy," noting that a hindquarter of mutton was more expensive 57 than the shoulder (Child 1833: 46). Fogg, too, prices the hindquarter at two to four cents more than the forequarter (1832: xxxii-xxxiii). In light of this, the relative percentages of these parts were examined for each site to see whether there was a preponderance of hindquarter elements in relation to forequarter parts at the domestic sites, the former being the more highly valued parts of these animals. Urban domestic sites were hypothesized to possess more hindquarter elements—representing the purchase of such coveted, meaty parts as hams, for example, or legs of mutton—than would a butcher's site, which would have sold off those pieces to consumers.

Similarly, the adult cattle bones in the assemblages were ranked according to the meat cut value found in contemporary records. Arthur Young, in his 1793 "Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts," presents a diagram of the cuts of meat created from a steer, along with a chart providing the price of each cut in London at that time. From this, the adult cattle faunal remains from the sites in this study were broken down into the relative percentage of elements present for each cut of meat, then plotted by price category. An hypothesis was formulated that bones from cheaper, less desirable cuts of meat would be found at a butcher's site, not as markers of socioeconomic status, but under the assumption that consumers would be more likely to purchase the more desirable (read, higher priced) cuts, which remains would then be found in greater relative quantities at the urban domestic sites in the study. The bones remaining at the butcher's were supposed to be representing cheaper cuts, as the butcher would be more motivated to sell high priced cuts of beef.

The results of these analyses were puzzling. For the most part, the analyses did not work the way they were "supposed" to. When the basic element distribution analyses were conducted, the Williamsburg Movie Theater site looked very different from the eighteenth-century Firehouse butcher site, but could not be easily, if at all, distinguished from nineteenth-century domestic sites, with their general lack of heads and feet and preponderance of body cuts. As with the basic element distribution comparison, no common pattern was seen among the domestic sites which made them distinguishable as a group from the Theater assemblage when meat cuts were the unit of analysis, not individual bones.

Possible explanations are many, definite ones few. One relates to the fact that the Theater assemblage is located behind a dwelling. Perhaps the assemblage is the refuse from a butcher's operation; at the same time, however, it may have served as the repository for meat food remains consumed by his own family, presumably the less desirable, cheaper pieces of meat. This commingling of distributor-processor and household food remains may have masked any attributes that would have been apparent had only processing gone on at the site.

An alternative explanation is the possibility of the filleting of meat before sale, leaving the quantities of meaty bones seen at the Theater site that confounded the hypotheses posed above. Filleting also allows for the potentiality that the ambiguities found in the Theater assemblage in comparison to the domestic sites, and likely the lack of pattern seen in the domestic sites themselves is a result of the supposedly "modern" purchasing practice of selling and buying boneless meats. This in itself could explain the quantities of bones representing both high and low priced cuts of meat found at all the nineteenth-century sites in this study.

The current results do not deny or confirm that the Theater site is a butcher's site so much as they indicate that one of the traditional tests and measures commonly used by zooarchaeologists, element distributional analysis, may not be appropriate to study of more recent time periods, of areas where laws have altered the nature of urban processing and disposal of meat remains, or, as is most likely in this case, in towns such as Williamsburg, for which a lack of context for the results exists because the nineteenth-century distribution system is not well understood.

Species Diversity

Based on results from species diversity analyses (summarized above), refuse from the butcher's shop was hypothesized to harbor only a narrow range of species, as would be expected from a specialized producer/distributor. The Williamsburg Movie Theater assemblage fits the proposed scenario perfectly, almost shockingly so, and in great contrast to all other sites in the sample under discussion (Table 1). Fully 97% of the Theater bones belong to the domestic mammal category: cattle, pigs, and sheep or goat. The remaining 3% came from a dog, a commensal species (that is, a species not normally part of the cuisine of the culture under study, but often, as with dogs, cats, and mice in Anglo-American culture, associated with human habitation). This extreme lack of species diversity was entirely unexpected; faunal assemblages like that from the Theater are just not seen ordinarily.

The other sites in the sample are typical of urban and rural domestic sites: the urban sites display more reliance on domestic meats, mammal and bird, and have fewer wild species than the rural sites, which reverse these generalizations. However, regardless of overall abundance or lack of diversity, all of the domestic sites have in their faunal assemblages domestic mammals and birds, wild mammals and birds, turtles, and fish, in varying proportions. Next to these assemblages, the overwhelming concentration of domestic mammal bones—to the exclusion of all else—from that of the Theater makes it stands out as something very different.

Basic Element Distributions

To recap models of relative levels of market participation based on basic element distributions, rural sites, where animals are raised, slaughtered, and disposed of on site, show an element distribution approaching that of the normal ratio seen in the complete skeleton. At sites which participate in an urban market economy, a preponderance of meaty body elements is seen, greatly outnumbering the less desirable head and foot parts. A butcher's site, then, is hypothesized to possess mostly waste parts—heads and feet—reversing the pattern seen at urban domestic sites.

The Firehouse butcher's assemblage illustrates this model very well (Table 2). In this assemblage, body parts are never the dominant proportion of bones for any of the major domesticates under study. Head bones are most likely to be the majority element, followed typically by body elements, with foot elements making up the smallest proportion of the total. The Theater element distribution differs from this pattern, as a rule showing an inverse profile to that described above, which makes it look surprisingly like a typical urban domestic site. Body part elements are the greatest percentage of bones in the pig, 59 60 61 adult cattle, and caprine (sheep or goat) assemblages, accompanied by smaller proportions of head elements, and few if any foot elements. The immature cattle pattern differs from that seen for the other species, a possible consequence of small sample size. The calf head elements just outnumber in proportion the body elements, which in turn are more than double the percentage of foot elements.

The Theater site does not evince such a clear pattern of difference in comparison with the domestic sites in the sample (see Table 1), on the whole looking very much like household refuse on the basis of the element distributions. The proportions of head/body/feet elements for adult cattle and caprines are very similar for both the Theater site and the various domestic sites. In each case, body elements predominate over the other skeletal parts. Three of the sites mirror that of the Theater, with head elements showing up as the next most prevalent bone type, followed by foot bones. The remaining three sites reverse that pattern; foot elements predominate over head elements. The element distribution for immature cattle does not show a strong correlation among the domestic sites, but appears in the main to show more body part elements than heads and feet. The Theater assemblage, however, has a bare majority of its immature cattle bones in head elements, followed closely by body elements.

The pig elements display the only marked difference between the Theater assemblage and the domestic sites. The nineteenth-century domestic sites all have a significant proportion of pig bones in the form of head elements, all greater than 60%. The second most prevalent bone type is body elements (never more than 30% of the total), followed by feet elements in every case. In contrast, the Theater site has a slim majority of pig bones in body elements (54.2%), followed by head elements (45.8%). Also unlike all the other sites, no pig foot elements appear at the Theater site.

Forequarter/Hindquarter Ratios

As noted above, the failure of the basic element distributional analysis, based on individual head, body, and foot bone ratios, required a reexamination of the method. Because animal foods were not generally distributed as individual bones, but as cuts of meat, the analysis was run again, this time using data that reflected the historical values and desirability of specific animal parts. In this section, caprine and pig fore- and hindquarters are compared in light of known historical preferences. The body elements of the animals were combined into forequarter (scapula, humerus, radius, and ulna) and hindquarter (inominate, femur, tibia, and fibula) groups, as suggested by contemporary accounts. Then the ratios of each versus the other were compared (adult cattle, possessing a different, more detailed historical value ranking, were handled separately, see below). Urban domestic sites were hypothesized to possess more hindquarter elements—representing the purchase of such coveted, meaty parts as hams, for example, or legs of mutton—than would a butcher's site, which would have sold off those pieces to consumers.

Again, as in the study of overall element distributions, the Firehouse butcher site fits the model, with a minimum of 60% of elements in the forequarter category for these two species (Table 3). So, too, does the Theater site, having proportionately more pig and caprine forequarter than hindquarter elements. The domestic sites, however, do not fall into place quite as neatly. When the Theater assemblage is compared to the domestic sites in terms of ratios of fore- and hind-quarter elements, again no true pattern emerges. Four 62 63 of the domestic sites have a nearly equal proportion of pig fore- and hindquarters. The other two sites are split—one possesses the expected preponderance of hindquarters for a domestic site; the other shows a proportion like that hypothesized for a butcher's establishment. The caprine bones likewise display no dominant pattern: three sites do have a greater frequency of hindquarter elements; however, two other sites have an equal distribution of fore- and hindquarter elements, and the remaining site has more fore- than hind- parts. Like the element distributions, the urban domestic sites have no common profile—no site has a consistent majority of fore- or hindquarter elements, varying both by site and by species.

Ranked Meat Cut Percentages

Beef cuts, too, were ranked according to contemporary notions of value. Here, though, more detailed historical information was available, allowing for the ranking of beef not just into fore-or hindquarters as with caprines and pigs, but into specific meat cuts, such as "rump" or "mouse buttock." These historical sources gave price information as well, facilitating comparisons of the sites based on ratios of high priced versus lower priced beef cuts (Table 4). We posited that the higher priced cuts would appear at the domestic sites, a result of consumer preference for desirable, higher-priced beef cuts, and butcher preference to profit from selling these pieces before they spoiled. Lower priced cuts, in general, we expected to find in the butcher's refuse, presuming a smaller incentive to rid oneself of less expensive meat cuts.

As with the other element distribution comparisons attempted above, no common pattern was seen among the domestic sites which made them distinguishable as a group from the Theater assemblage. The expected meat cut distributions did not appear. Among the domestic sites, results were highly variable, each site exhibiting a mix of bones from meat cuts in all price categories. This pattern was seen as well at the Theater site, where a surprisingly high percentage of bones associated with more expensive meat cuts such as sirloin and rump cuts were seen, along with the expected remains from cheaper cuts.

This unexpected bone distribution at the Theater site may be a result of de-boning and filleting meat before sale, an activity implied in contemporary cookbook instructions to acquire boned meat for such dishes as veal cutlets, and which would result in the bones from expensive cuts remaining at the processing site: "Have the veal cut into slices about 3/ of an inch in thickness…" (Beeton 1865: 354). However, Child's household economy book The American Frugal Housewife recommends the purchase of the bones leftover from filleting meat: "Bones from which roasting pieces [more expensive cuts] have been cut may be bought in the market for ten or twelve cents, from which a very rich soup may be made… If the bones left from the rump [another pricey portion] be bought, they will be found full of marrow…" (Child 1833:44). This practice should restore the expected pattern, as bones from expensive cuts would still leave the butcher's shop. It appears that, in early nineteenth-century Williamsburg, at least, this practice was not a factor in influencing the pattern seen at the sites in our study.

Discussion

After an examination of the element distribution results, only two definitive statements can be made about the marketing and distribution of meat as seen in the Williamsburg Theater faunal remains: they represent only large domestic mammals, and the occupant of the site was not acquiring and processing whole animals on-site. While all element types, except pig foot elements, were represented in the assemblage, the generally low ratio of head and foot to body elements indicates that animals had been partially processed—likely having their heads and feet removed—prior to their arrival at the Theater site. This is consistent with patterns established once municipal areas implement laws prohibiting certain activities, such as slaughtering, within city limits (Landon 1996:8).

Beyond this, few definite assertions may be made. None of the sites in the sample display the patterns hypothesized by this study, or truly any pattern at all when the element distribution analysis was performed. Possibly, a differentiation would be visible if the domestic sites in question were understood in greater detail. Information about the inhabitants of the sites, their levels of wealth, or their social standing, is sparse, and few other early nineteenth-century faunal assemblages from the Chesapeake have been analyzed to put them into context. Little information is currently available as well on links these households had to the surrounding areas, and the level of their ability to bypass the urban distributors. A project undertaking a greater understanding of domestic faunal assemblages of the nineteenth century, a task beyond the scope of this analysis, would be of great aid in creating a backdrop against which to explore contemporary processing and distribution sites. Perhaps a pattern is present in element distributions, but is not understood because of lack of knowledge about the nature of nineteenth-century faunal assemblages.

Some other possibilities exist, however, for explaining the perceived lack of pattern in the element distributions. As proposed above, possible commingling of business and household food refuse may have corrupted the profile for the Theater site, giving it some of the characteristics of a domestic site. Perhaps, too, the practice of butchery in the nineteenth century, of selling and buying boneless meats as well as cuts on the bone, left its mark. The results of this study appear to say that the day-to-day working of butchers and other middlemen processors and distributors are not well enough understood to enable the creation of fruitful predictions about differences between these sites and domestic sites. Research in this direction, again, beyond the scope of this project would be essential to further analytical attempts akin to that tried here.

Only the species diversity analysis proved successful in revealing an obvious difference in the assemblages, one which may be the key element in distinguishing between processor and consumer sites in the nineteenth century: the Theater site evinced an amazing lack of diversity, showing only large domestic mammals, in contrast to the other sites in the study, which had birds, fish, and wild species in evidence. This measure of difference may be the way, at this point, to mark the Theater assemblage as a different type of site than the domestic sites. The high concentration of only domestic mammal remains may be an attribute of nineteenth-century butchers' faunal assemblages, and one piece in the puzzle of the distribution systems of which they were a part.

Conclusion

The faunal assemblage from the Williamsburg Movie Theater site may well be that from a butcher practicing his trade in the early to mid nineteenth-century. However, until further work is conducted to delineate the nature of both nineteenth-century domestic sites (and the differences among them) and processor/distributor sites, the attribution will be in doubt. A few characteristics of the site do, however, appear to support the notion that the Theater site is indeed that of a butcher: the extreme lack of species diversity in the assemblage, the relatively small percentage of domestic refuse found in the pits along with the bones, and the clustering of earlier butchering activity in the vicinity of the site.

Williamsburg's well understood eighteenth-century market system did not come to a complete halt with the removal of the capital of Virginia to Richmond in 1780. The population of the city and environs changed very little, remaining above a thousand inhabitants, well above the threshold proposed by Walsh et al. to effect a focus on market production of animal foods on the surrounding farms (Walsh et al. 1997:61). From the perspective of the faunal evidence, however, something different began to happen. The sites examined have little apparent patterning, and the models that explain the patterns seen in eighteenth-century assemblages do not appear to have their usual utility. It is likely that new models will have to be created to explain the relationships described here. It is to be hoped that further studies of both processor and consumer sites within this new style of market economy will provide the information that is now lacking, information that reveal the true role in that economy of the faunal assemblage excavated at the Williamsburg Movie Theater.

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