![]() ![]() When he hit the bottom, he found something he had never encountered on previous archaeological forays: a clay tobacco pipe. He kept digging, and by two that afternoon, he was fourteen feet down, his rope tied to the bumper of his car. By daylight, he was three feet down in the well and already finding bottles. I put out my hard hat, work boots, my ropes, my buckets, all my tools, and the next morning at 4 am, I’m back at the corner of Magazine, alone, and I start digging.”ĭiez had found an old brick-lined well about five feet in diameter. “I drove back home around six, seven o’clock. I realized that I had found either an old outhouse or I’d found an old well,” he said. “I found disturbances and started hitting bricks and granite and glass everywhere all in a little circle. Out came the probe, and Diez got to work. He landed on the corner of Magazine Street and Howard Avenue (now Andrew Higgins) and stopped at the site of a recent demolition. ![]() One particular Friday afternoon, Diez took off after school and drove from his home in Gonzales to New Orleans, planning to scout out a privy or two. Alternatively, when he would insert the probe, and it sank all the way up to the handle, he’d get out a shovel and start digging.ĭouglas Diez's collection of antique pipes will soon be displayed in the Great River Road Museum. To locate a privy or well, Diez would insert his probe into the ground to see how deep it would go before meeting resistance if it only went a couple of feet before stopping, the soil was likely undisturbed, and there was no privy in that spot. Infill dirt does not compact to the degree of untouched soil, so bottle diggers-searching on residential lots in small towns as well as urban neighborhoods-can use long probes to find “disturbed soil” in the subsurface. Families in the 1800s would routinely toss unwanted household items in their privy, today amateur and professional archaeologists might find anything in them from crockery and shoes to turtle and oyster shells, combs, eyeglasses, and of course, bottles.ĭuring the rise of modern plumbing, privies were filled in with soil, effectively burying their contents. It didn’t take long for Diez to teach himself the archaeological technique of probing-similar to the practice used by gas line companies -to find privies, the ultimate source of bottles. It all began with a challenge from his grandmother, who promised him use of the car and five dollars each time he went digging for antique bottles. After school, he could be found hip deep in area swamps, in old wells, and most often, in the buried outhouses of New Orleans past. ![]() When he was fifteen years old, Douglas Diez would spend afternoons taking his grandmother’s car out to go bottle digging. Over fifty years, Gonzales native Douglas Diez has amassed over five thousand historic smoking pipes while digging in abandoned wells and privies all across the world. ![]()
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