Around and outside the mall

Here I am, throwing away the slender etiquette felt pen I used, standing by the wastebasket, ready to throw things in like darts. When I stopped, I told myself, wait a minute. I thought it was just a pile of garbage? From my crazy career? I have a historical gold nugget in my hand.

Last autumn, a team of archaeologists made an excavation in the shopping center of the National Museum of Indian Future. This building with a value of 1. 1 billion dollars will stand in the east of the National Air and Space Museum. They found a lot of rubbish. The National Historical Protection Law requires that every building funded by the federal government must first inspect its location to determine its possible impact on cultural resources, which means that it must be inspected to determine whether there are cultural relics of the past civilization.

This is a useful policy. Even if it involves something other than early civilization, our search for the excavation site has paid off for the Smithsonian. More than ten years ago, a huge bone was pulled out of the soil at a construction site near Lago, Maryland, which later proved to be the rib of a mammoth, so the project was delayed for several days. I knelt in the mud and reported this discovery to * * *. When the Smithsonian paleontologists examined this discovery and reported it in the media, we learned more about mammoths.

I still remember that in 1984, a Cyprus log 29,000 years ago was dragged out of the cave, which will become the underground cluster of Arthur M. Seckler Gallery and the National Museum of African Art. We once again had the opportunity to learn about Washington at the beginning of the last ice age.

The shopping center of the Indian Museum is located between the Air and Space Museum and the American Botanical Garden. Today, it is an open green grassland, a good place for volleyball matches, and you can see the amazing parliament building. But in the second half of19th century, until 1928, it was a residential area, and its environment was implied by the name of a dirt road, which was behind the house: lice lane.

This is not an area with high rent. Perhaps most residents are more or less temporary. An oil tank of Washington Gas Company loomed in the street, next to E.N. Gray &; Foundry company and Taylor low rock field. Living in these narrow houses are immigrants from Europe and some African American families. /kloc-there are no traces of residents in the 0/7th century. Konoi Indians, a group of fairly stable Algonquin farmers, obviously didn't want to settle in the swamp.

When the Tiber River (along today's Constitution Avenue) was diverted at 18 15, the search team dug 8 feet of soil to fill the swamp. They found "oyster shells, 400 pounds of oyster shells!" " Donna seifert, project manager, urban archaeologist, planner and architect of the John Milner Society, said,

I don't know, maybe oysters were cheap at that time, but 400 pounds of oyster shells meant a lot of oysters. I feel as if someone had a big party outside. "Oh, no," said seifert. We looked at the map and found an oyster house around the corner.

There are also many large bags of pottery fragments, British blue pottery, kitchen utensils, antique beer bottles, medicine bottles, animal bones, and some ugly dolls. All these items were taken to Milner Laboratory in Alexandria, Virginia for analysis to determine what glass the discarded plates and bottles were made of, for example. There will be a report this summer.

Archaeologists have noticed that residents tend to dump garbage in the backyard and occasionally shovel dirt on it. Since most houses have no running water or bathrooms, "we hope to find outhouses," seifert said, "because any kind of pits, reservoirs and even wells, once abandoned, will soon be filled with garbage. This makes it a bit like a time capsule. Unfortunately, local people only use box toilets, which have detachable drawers and are easy to clean.

Too bad. Ah, all right. The things scattered in the yard are not collected neatly in the pit. One problem is that you are often not sure whether they really belong to the same place in time and space.

I saw an old photo about lice alley, maybe an angry article about the neglected community in Washington. Lutz alley showed rows of collapsed wooden brick buildings, just a few blocks from the Capitol. As early as19th century,

A French tourist described it in 1840: "Residents have cows and pigs, but there are no stables. These animals wander around all day. " Stayed in the city all night. Women milked on the sidewalk and showered passers-by. "Until 1863, there was no organized garbage collection station in this city. Even so, I suspect that Lice Lane may not be the first organized garbage collection station. "

But I am fascinated by erasing history from garbage, or rather, from what we do, taking it for granted that we have never considered them. Many of the earliest cultures we know were inferred by archaeologists from the Middle Ages. Why not suitable for modern culture? It is what we don't notice. The tools we use every day, such as toothbrushes, spoons and bottled water, often prove to be clues to a particular society.

Just finding an elaborate grave in Germany can produce all kinds of opinions and suggestions: for example, believing in the afterlife. A bell-shaped drinking fountain without a handle may have been found in the grave, which surprised the experts and patted their foreheads: beaker man is coming! Finding enough beakers, a shocking new picture of trade in the Bronze Age appeared, a network covering the whole of Western Europe. The smallest detail may also contain the essence of our time. The toothpicks discarded today may make archaeologists in the 22 nd century feel palpitations.

I don't know what secrets the residents of Lice Lane may be hiding. The original wooden house was demolished in the middle of this century and replaced by brick row houses, and then the whole area was razed to the ground in the 1930s. During World War II, a temporary office building was built there, but it was demolished about 25 years later. We do know that most people are short-term renters, and among the women who lived there in the middle of this century, a few claimed to be professionals, which was one of the items listed in the census form at that time. Obviously, there is no big secret.

What clues will these poor pieces and bottles give us? Surprisingly, a thoughtful person can get a lot from very few things.

Take animal bones as an example.

"If you look at bones carefully," said Teresa singleton, from the anthropology department of the National Museum of Natural History, "they are cut into small pieces, with slice marks or very brittle, then we can say that they are stewed." Singleton added: "Then you look at ceramic products. If what you see is mostly bowls, you will know that these people often drink soup or stew. "

You won't find many steak knife in Lutz Lane.

But how do we distinguish African Americans from Irish, German and French immigrants? Donna seifert said, "The hardest thing is to find out whose garbage we are looking at.

"What you need is quantity. You need enough samples of consumer strategies to draw a conclusion. Now, the medicine bottle can tell you something. On another website, to give you an example, we found that people of different nationalities tend to use different patented drugs, "singleton explained.

In this period of research, professionals also have some discussions, not to mention disputes. Just a genus.