Spanish Colonial Era
By 1784 the property had changed hands multiple times, ending up with Antonio Boudousquier, but the Good Friday fire of 1788 burned down whatever structures stood on the lot then. The soot from this fire acts as a clear temporal marker in the ground.
The layer in Image 1.6 is visible as a dark band in the wall of the excavation unit. Archaeologists call the layers visible like this in the straight walls of the excavation unit the soil profile. The round hole in the floor is likely where a post braced the wall of this post-in-ground structure.
After this date, the history of the lot becomes intermingled with that of the corner lot, until, around 1801, it became part of Don Francisco Balthazar Languille’s corner residential complex at Royal Street and St. Ann. The construction history in the rear of the lot was complex, with outbuilding walls and subsurface features from 1788 to 1800 (when there may have been some kind of storehouse on the lot) intersected and incorporated by ones from the 1801 construction. The most unusual of these contained a small brick arch, apparently located in what would have been a room slightly below grade level. Historian Benjamin Maygarden suggested that this may have been a potager, an opening beneath hearths designed to slowly cook meals like stews. The Hermann-Grima house’s kitchen contains an extant example of one of these features. This one was later filled in with brick, tough unstable soils beneath it proved to be a problem throughout its history, as can be seen with the bracing wall constructed against it.
The area at the back of the lot was later re-used, with a hastily constructed brick wall constructed to create a privy shaft for the 1801 structure. When this privy was abandoned (probably in the 1850s), it was filled with household trash. Such deposits are like a time capsule for archaeologists, as they were often filled very quickly and can thus be connected to specific individuals who occupied a dwelling.