BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—CBS Boston reports that an excavation at the site of Paul Revere’s home, which was built in Boston’s North End in 1711, has uncovered a four-foot-by-six-foot brick rectangle that may have served as a privy. “Typically what you would do is you would dig a big pit, you’d line it with bricks,” said city archaeologist Joe Bagley. “You typically would also line it with clay, because you didn’t want the contents to leach into your well.” The handle to an eighteenth-century German-made beer stein is the only item to have been found in the pit so far, but the outhouse could yield thousands of discarded artifacts, in addition to information on the health and diet of the Revere family. To read about a Revolutionary War–era discovery elsewhere in Massachusetts, go to “Finding Parker’s Revenge.”
