OF CESSPITS AND SEWERS
On a balmy July afternoon, archaeologist Roos van Oosten strides through a muddied plot of land near the center of the Dutch city of Leiden and takes an exploratory sniff. The plot, bordered on all sides by apartment buildings, will soon be part of a housing development known as the Meelfabriek, but, for now, van Oosten and a team of excavators from RAAP Archaeological Consultancy are studying the remnants of a 400-year-old neighborhood.
With another sniff, van Oosten gestures to a brick-lined pipe, half obscured with mud. A backhoe rumbles to life and swings its toothed bucket down on the pipe, cracking it open. It is a sewer. Exposed to all present is a stew of squelching, midnight-black muck—excrement that has been brewing for four centuries. Released into the air is an eye-watering aroma, a smell so concentrated and forceful it seems to take shape as a cloud. The excavators stagger back a step, turning their cheeks as though they’ve been slapped. Van Oosten peers down into the muck, and, with a lilt in her voice, says, “Jackpot!” She scribbles notes on a small pad. From her backpack she pulls a laminated map of Leiden showing the layout of the walled city in the mid-seventeenth century. She moves her finger across the map, following the route of the sewer pipe.
Van Oosten is a connoisseur of muck. She has spent the last decade sifting through the cesspits and sewers of medieval European cities, studying how people of
