Station: [9] The cesspit

“Disposing of sewage and faecal matter has long been a problem for hygiene in the early modern era. While country-dwellers use stables or muck hills, towns possess finer facilities: public toilets of wood, for instance, built above streams and rivers, or cesspits that do double duty as refuse pits. Castles have seen the triumph of lavatories on external walls – the faecal matter thus ends up directly in the moat below.

Particularly cesspits prove to be veritable goldmines for archaeologists: because people used them to dispose of all manner of things that we carefully separate in today’s world, cesspits frequently yield interesting traces of times gone by. Schloss Horst is no exception: in the 16th century, a relatively modern waste disposal system is created involving subterranean shafts. This is exactly where shards of tableware or other commodities from renaissance times were found during excavations in the 1990s.”