A Parasitological Examination of a Sample from Feature 10, the Armoury Site, Virginia

One sediment sample from the Armoury, an 18th-century forge site located in Williamsburg, Virginia, was submitted to the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research for parasitological examination. The sample analyzed was collected from Feature 10 in order to verify the feature’s function as a privy. Eighteen total eggs from both roundworms (Ascaris sp.) and whipworms (Trichuris sp.) were identified in the fifteen-gram Armoury sample. Although the density of eggs per gram falls below the Jones metric for determining privy deposits, Jacobucci and Trigg argue that based on comparative data from other privy sites in the Northeast, as well as the variability of egg preservation, Feature 10 does represent a historic privy.