LAFAYETTE -- While excavating her home's old outhouse pit, Rebecca Schwendler set down her trowel and picked up the phone after unearthing what looked like two human finger bones and the top of a human thigh bone.
Eight men and one woman from the Office of the Medical Examiner and the Lafayette Police Department stood in her Old Town Lafayette backyard a day later and sent the remains to Colorado State University for analysis.
"I thought 'Oh, my god. What if he's in my outhouse?'" Schwendler said, referring to a reputed unsolved murder in Lafayette in 1927, the year of the nearby Columbine Mine Massacre.
A union labor organizer for area coal miners lived in her house a couple of years later, and she wondered if somehow the outdoor privy on the northeast corner of her lot had become a secret stash for body parts related to revenge.
The CSU report identified the remains as pig bones.
But Schwendler, who holds a doctorate in anthropology with a concentration in archeology and works as a public lands advocate at the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Denver office, realized that the hole held other secrets.
"A lot of times, they threw things down the outhouse hole that they didn't want other people to see," she said of her systematic spring 2010 dig 6 feet down in the 4-foot by 4-foot area.
For instance, Schwendler, 40, recovered a glass syringe and patent medicine bottles sold over the counter at pharmacies, which often contained opiates or alcohol. Poker chips and hair dye sold as Mayor Walnut Oil bottled in Kansas City, Mo., also turned up.
To learn more from the 100-plus items in the collection, Schwendler on Tuesday gave three white banker boxes to Bonnie Clark, a University of Denver associate professor of anthropology. She and a small independent study class plan to analyze the materials this spring quarter and collaborate with Schwendler in filing a social history report with the state Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation and The Lafayette Miners Museum.
Clark said that it helps enormously that the artifacts come with context.
For instance, before tucking each one into individual Ziploc bags, Schwendler mapped each piece in a highly controlled, vertical and horizontal strata and categorized them in three eras: the Victorian era (1892-1900); the World War I era (1900-1918); and the post World War I era (1918 to the late 1940s or early 1950s, when the house underwent an indoor plumbing remodel).
"I am really interested that there is a complete teacup. Whole vessels sometimes get thrown away when they're associated with someone," Clark said. "Maybe it was the preacher's cup, and when he died, his wife couldn't bear to look at it."
The privy's record begins in 1892, when a furniture maker named Charles Keen bought the plot from Mary Miller -- the town founder who named it after her late husband, Lafayette Miller -- and built the house for his wife and baby daughter.
Calf foot bones found at this lowest level might have been used to make a nutritive, easy-to-digest gelatin soup either for that baby or the preacher who bought the house for his wife and three daughters in 1895 and died five years later from unknown causes, Schwendler said.
The Victorian level of the pit also yielded fragments of a soup tureen with hand-painted floral print and gold leaf on the rim and handles.
Maybe one of the preacher's daughters accidentally broke it and hid the shards in the privy, said Jeanne Robertson, a Denver resident and Schwendler relative who volunteered to help with the dig.
She held a flashlight while Schwendler worked in the hole and also spent hours shaking 1/8-inch mesh screens to retrieve tiny items found at the site.
Metal, wooden and mother-of-pearl buttons all say something about the people using the outhouse and likely wound up in the pit due to the partial disrobing that happens in such places, Schwendler said.
Finding such items came as a surprise and a relief to Robertson.
"I thought we were going to come up with some big turds, which would have made me very unhappy," she said, laughing. "It did kind of stink a little bit, but not like sewage. It was like something dank, though."
In the middle level, Schwendler and her volunteers found things likely discarded by William Richards, the Welsh coal miner who lived in the house the longest -- from 1907 to 1937 -- and for whom Schwendler named the home on the Lafayette Register of Historic Properties.
Besides finding two Edison bulbs, the earliest light bulbs made, and more cans for paint and potted meats at this level, she found personal effects. They include two white jars of cold cream -- one empty and another partially full -- along with a pipe stem that likely belonged to the Richards couple.
On a recent Saturday, while kneeling by the carefully organized boxes she packed to give to Clark, Schwendler reflected on her work.
She undertook it to see if the privy would yield any cultural deposits before she permanently capped it and converted the outbuilding over it into a chicken coop.
But Schwendler discouraged those without archeological expertise to take on such a project, a sentiment echoed by archeologists nationwide in response to the premier later this month of a Spike TV reality show on the subject called "American Diggers."
"It's not unlawful to dig on private property," she said. "And it's not like we want to shut people out of their own interests. But if it's done right, you learn a hundred times more than what you would otherwise."
No one would place inherent value on the other corroded and sometimes rotted stuff she found, such as a broken metal corset rib, a Model T radiator cap and brake rod and peach pits.
"But archeologists have a saying that what is important is not what you find, but what you find out," Schwendler said.
The items give her and historians clues about the class, health, hobbies, diet, occupation, gender and more of previous residents now mostly lost in time.
"I always wanted to live in an old house, and (the privy deposits) have made me even more connected to the people who lived here before," Schwendler said.
For more information on Lafayette history, visit cityoflafayette.com/Page.asp?NavID=316.
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