Listen to audio by Dr. James Tuck
This is part of the original waterfront of the Colony of Avalon. One of the first things that the settlers did, and that Captain Wynne mentioned in one of his letters, was to begin to, in his words, "win ground in two ways." We now know how they did this, they built a wall that ultimately became the sea wall or the edge of the harbour, probably almost out in the Pool and then began to fill in behind that.

You can see in the centre of the picture a part of that sea wall. In fact, the place where we're standing would, in the year 1625 or so, have been part of the Pool itself and we would have been standing seven or eight feet below where we're standing now and, given the tide the way it is, up to our waists in water. Once the land was levelled and the sea wall built, the first settlers built a long stone building about 56 x 16 feet (17.1 x 4.9 metres); you can see that at the upper part of the photograph just at the extreme left.

We think this building was walled up with stone and we know it was covered with a slate roof. It was used partly as a warehouse; small boats, or lighters, could have come up to the door somewhere along the sea wall and unloaded and loaded fish and supplies from England and so forth. In the very early years there was an alchemist or a goldfiner at work in the very far end of the warehouse. We found his crucibles and cupels, ceramics that these people used to test rocks to see if they contained any precious metals.

Fragments of crucibles and cupels found in the waterfront warehouse. Fragments of crucibles and cupels, found in the earliest layers of the waterfront warehouse, indicate that an alchemist, or goldfiner, was assaying local rocks in a search for precious metals during the first years of the Avalon settlement. Reproduced by permission of the Archaeology Unit, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland. (21 kb)

In the western end of the building on a flagstone floor it seems that in the 1670s there was a cooper, or barrelmaker, working, because we found coopers' tools on the floor. If you look a little bit further to the right, you can see a rectangular stone basin. In that pit we found barrel parts and off-cuts and sawdust and shavings and other waste that a cooperage would have produced. That rectangular structure wasn't built originally to contain the refuse from a cooper's shop, but was a privy, or one of the privies, from the original Colony of Avalon. It is designed so that there are outlets through the sea wall and these outlets are below the high tide line. In theory, anyway, the tide would come in twice a day and kind of flush the toilet for you.

Fortunately for archaeologists this "tidal toilet" didn't work perfectly because a great deal of material accumulated in the privy. Eventually it became full and when it was eventually capped off with dirt and whatever was in there, some of it from the earliest times, was preserved when we dug it in the early 1990s.

Privies don't sound like very pleasant places to dig, but in fact privies can be a kind of treasure trove for archaeologists. For one thing, things that fall in a privy usually stay there, and secondly, the moist environment in a privy is very apt to preserve things that are not often preserved.

Plum pits that were discarded during the 17th century. These plum pits were discarded in the privy throughout the 17th century. The plum trees found on the Ferryland site and throughout the southern Avalon Peninsula today are descended from plums brought by the first settlers at Avalon. Reproduced by permission of the Archaeology Unit, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland. (17 kb)

We found bits of cloth that probably served as the 17th-century equivalent of toilet paper, wooden objects — spoons and furniture parts — fragments of leather shoes, a leather knife case, or sheath, thousands and thousands of bones from fish, mammals and birds that were used as food, and even the eggs of human intestinal parasites to the rate of about 30,000 per gram. So while all this doesn't sound very appetizing, it gives us some indication about health and disease and a look at some of the objects from the 17th century that are only very rarely preserved on archaeological sites.

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© 1999, Colony of Avalon Foundation.

Revised March 2002.