NOVA

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Narrator

When most people think of an archaeologist they imagine a khaki-clad adventurer trekking through the deserts of Egypt. But believe it or not there are treasure troves of history buried even in the most well-developed cities. And Joe Bagley is the guy who knows where to find them. People don't realize that there's archaeological sites next door and right here and around the corner. So we have collections from all over the city. We have Paul Revere's houses over here, Boston Commons here, we have Faneuil Hall here. -

Narrator

Joe is the archaeologist for the city of Boston, Massachusetts. It's his job to keep track of everything that was thrown out, buried, broken, or lost in the city for the last 8,000 years. For a long time people thought that digging for artifacts underneath big cities was sort of a lost cause. Because cities are constantly changing and growing everyone assumed that anything worthwhile had already been steam-rolled or jack-hammered into oblivion. But for Boston, a massive highway construction project called The Big Dig, changed all that. People just weren't sure what could still be left from the past in an area like downtown Boston. But what they found when they started to kind of peel away the layers of construction underneath the raised highway, were these little pockets of preservation. You only need a couple square feet and that can contain incredible amounts of information about the past. -

Narrator

Like this 17th century outhouse, or privy, that archaeologists dug up in Boston's North End. The outhouse belonged to a Puritan woman from 1690 and it still smelled bad more than 300 years later. Now a pile of colonial poop may not exactly sound like the Holy Grail to you or me, but to people like Joe... So a privy is an archeological gold mine. Basically it's what we live to find. The reason why they're so important to archaeologists is that they're one of the areas that you would throw away your garbage. -

Narrator

Boston's early settlers never realized that their toilets would one day become time capsules. So they didn't edit the information they threw into them. And as it turns out, the ultra-religious Puritans were nothing like their diaries and historical documents would lead you to believe. So we had this Puritan woman living in Boston in the 1690s who should have been pious and demure and all these different things, and it turned out she was wearing frilly lace. She had a bowling ball, which was illegal for Bostonians to have at the time. She broke every single rule of being a Puritan woman in Boston. -

Narrator

But what really amazes Joe about the site is how much it went through to make it to the present day. -

Joe

To me, that's the kind of thing that I live for as an urban archaeologist. Then it makes me kind of paranoid about the whole city. It's like, where else are these little pockets then that could have a 17th-century site still sitting there completely intact. -

Narrator

Discoveries like this aren't just happening in Boston. Recently incredible finds have turned up underneath cities all around the world. At the site of the World Trade Center in New York, archaeologists found an entire 18th century shipwreck. And in Leicester, England, the body of King Richard III was discovered lying underneath a municipal parking lot. Hello! -

Narrator

Joe hasn't found a King. Well, not yet, but he says that piecing together personal moments from the lives of ordinary people can tell us just as much about the past. We're studying people, not the stuff. And so it's really not about the stuff. It's about the stories that the stuff tells us. -

Narrator

And who knows how many more of those stories could be hiding right under our feet.