The usual finds are mostly broken pottery, bottles, hand-made bricks and bones from 240 year-old pot roasts.
But once in awhile there’s a surprise item - like ye early American pornography.
In a thick book entitled “The Buried Past” by Penn archaeologist John Cotter, he tells of a “carved phallic end of a wooden shaft” found in an old privy pit “near the East Wing of Independence Hall.”
You might also call it a wooden circumcised penis or more crudely yet, a dildo. Its use was most likely as a barrel stopper. And it probably gave the boys in the tavern a good chuckle.
Yes, our founding fathers liked a good smutty joke and most of them smoked clay pipes. The smokers often carried a pipe tamper. The diggers have found the top piece of two metal pipe tamper, also called finials, depicting a man and women making love in the standing position.
One was dug up near Carpenters Hall, the other on the 300 block of Cypress Street. Since the naked couple are making love under a tree some think they represent Adam and Eve. So the smoking pipe tool is not only smutty, it’s sacrilegious to boot.