Shedding Light On `Sin City' -- Archaeologists Dig Up Brothels

Archaeology. In working at excavation sites, scientists sometimes uncover evidence of brothels, which in turn have led to interesting insights into everyday life in urban areas around the country and world.

There's a good reason it's called the oldest profession.

Prostitution was around long before ancient Greek scribes wrote about the lives of streetwalkers and courtesans. Now, scientists are getting down to the dirty work, to learn more about how prostitutes really lived.

Archaeologists have been excavating some old brothels to find out whether the business of sex has been the same through the ages. Apparently, some things never change.

In particular, studies of brothels from the past century or so reveal how entwined prostitution was with everyday life. From coast to coast, the remains of old brothels show how the working life of prostitutes, complete with lavish feasts and champagne to entertain their clients, often masked sordid conditions of cramped quarters, poor health and poverty.

Few archaeologists say that they specialize in studying houses of ill repute. Scientists usually stumble across brothels while looking for something more traditional, like an elegant fountain or extension of an ancient road. But once archaeologists have found an old bordello, they can learn about people and places other than just the wealthy and powerful ones described in history's written record.

An enticing topic

Still, there's a giggle factor to contend with. In Greece and Rome, ancient brothels have become something of a place to nudge and wink at paintings and tales of sexual escapades. In the city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece, archaeologists recently unearthed a 2,000-year-old brothel, complete with a roomful of sex toys, that's already targeted to become part of the local tourist trail.

Tourists aren't the only ones enticed by such research. A symposium on prostitution at a recent archaeology meeting, titled "Sin City," drew a standing-room-only crowd of scientists.

"You could wrap it up in academic language, but basically they wanted all the smutty details," says Minnesota archaeologist Anne Ketz, one of the presenters at the session.

Archaeologists say that studying these red-light districts can offer clues about the social structures of the day - as well as turn up some rather unusual finds, historically speaking.

"People sometimes do find condoms and syringes and some of those things," says Donna Seifert, an archaeologist who has studied the remains of a 19th-century brothel in downtown Washington, D.C.

Seifert, who works for the Alexandria, Va., office of the archaeological consulting firm John Milner Associates, led a team that dug into this site, which lies on the National Mall. The Smithsonian Institution commissioned her group to study the history of the site before building the new National Museum of the American Indian on top.

Party leftovers give insight

In the late 19th century, Seifert explains, this area wasn't such a pastoral piece of real estate. Nearby lay a foundry and a gas works, and most of the residents were working-class. In the midst of the neighborhood sat a large and relatively elegant house owned by Mary Ann Hall, a madam.

While digging at the site, Seifert's group found a trash dump that seemed unusual for such a working-class neighborhood. The dump held fragments of relatively fine ceramics, rimmed with gilt, that appeared classier than the stoneware found elsewhere.

"I thought, whose could these be?" recalls Seifert. "Then I looked around, and I saw who was next door - a really big brothel."

Mary Hall probably used the ceramics in fine meals that were part of the house's entertainment, Seifert says. Elsewhere in the trash heap, her group found more signs of a long-ago party: champagne corks and the wires that kept them in the bottles, and remains of rich foods like coconut and other exotic fruits.

Historical records show that Mary Hall's brothel was one of the highest class, one that served champagne instead of wine. In 1864, her house contained 18 "inmates," or prostitutes, by far the largest in the city. Within a couple of years of her retirement around 1878, the building was converted to a women's health clinic, and later to a school and a YMCA building.

Seifert described her finds this year at the "Sin City" session, during a meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

A prominent madam

"Sin City" might also apply to 19th-century St. Paul, Minn., where last spring archaeologists unearthed a brothel once run by one of the town's most prominent citizens, Nina Clifford.

Legend has it that in the late 1880s, an underground tunnel connected her bordello to a prestigious gentleman's club nearby, says Ketz of the consulting firm The 106 Group Ltd. Her group found the brothel - but alas, no tunnel - while surveying the site for Minnesota's new science museum.

Still, Nina Clifford's employees apparently had some connections around town. The police headquarters lay half a block away, and because the police chief's wife ran one of the neighborhood's brothels, there wasn't much effort to clamp down on prostitution, Ketz says. Also, the prescription bottles for medicines at the brothel probably were supplied by doctors across the street in the county morgue, she says.

Medicine was a daily part of life for many prostitutes of the time, other sites have shown. For instance, the 19th century red-light district of Los Angeles turned up a bottle of aquamarine liquid labeled "prophylactic fluid," archaeologists reported at the "Sin City" discussion.

Trash deposits at this brothel, which underlies the site of a new water-district building, include more medicine bottles and perfume flasks, bowls and jars. Prostitutes here apparently worked in small rooms, 10 by 10 feet with a bed, known as cribs. The women worked on an industrial scale, lined up along the windows to entice customers.

The ugly side of brothels

The darker side of life as a prostitute also appears in items found in a slum area of 19th-century New York City. Writers such as Charles Dickens considered this area, known as Five Points, a den of poverty, sin and crime.

In 1991, archaeologists started sifting through the remains of a block of Five Points that is now a new federal courthouse. Most of the artifacts - shreds of clothing, glass and so forth - showed how the neighborhood was made mostly of immigrants trying to start a respectable life in the crowded and unsanitary slum, says Rebecca Yamin of John Milner Associates' Philadelphia office.

But in one old house, Yamin's team found some unusual things, including an entire tea set made of fine Chinese porcelain, a huge number of wine bottles, the remains of rich foods like veal and clams, decorated chamber pots and female urinals.

"Putting it all together, it seemed like a lot of women were clustered here, doing a lot of fancy entertaining in this neighborhood," says Yamin.

These discoveries graphically show the difficulties of living as a prostitute. While some of the artifacts are fine ceramics and exotic delicacies, others are cheap stoneware and gristly bits of meat used by the prostitutes when their customers were gone. Urinals were probably used during long stretches of illness from venereal disease, Yamin says.

Life at the brothels was disturbing in many ways. At the Five Points site, archaeologists found among the outhouse refuse the remains of two healthy, full-term babies. Yamin speculates that the two may have been twins who were either stillborn or killed at birth because their mother couldn't support them while working.

Meanwhile, tiny ceramic cups painted with moral sayings suggested that at least some women struggled to raise children within the brothel.

----------------------------- For more about past brothels: -----------------------------

The investigation of Mary Hall's brothel in Washington, D.C., is described at http://www.si.edu/oahp/nmaidig

Links to references on prostitution in the ancient world can be found at http://ancienthistory.miningco.com/msubprostitute.htm

The March/April 1997 issue of Archaeology magazine has an article about the Five Points slum of New York City.