An Analysis of Two Privy Contexts from the Manalapan Village House Site (28-Mo-349)

Three soil samples from two mid-to-late eighteenth-century privies excavated at the Manalapan Village House Site in New Jersey were submitted to the Fiske Center for parasitological analysis. Despite the addition of a Lycopodium spore tracer to the samples to ensure against analyst error, no parasite ova were recovered from the three samples. Additional parasitological processing using the Fecasol flotation method was undertaken, as well as an examination of the remainder of the soil samples for uncharred macrobotanical remains and a visual examination of previously viewed slides for economically useful pollen taxa. All of these processes returned negative results, suggesting either extremely poor preservation conditions for biological specimens within the privy itself, or the cleaning of the privy prior to capping at the turn of the nineteenth century.