Press
Return to the list of articles
Who gets to unearth Philly's history?
The city’s soil is filled with historic treasures. But amateur diggers and professional archaeologists disagree about who should be allowed to access them.
Zoe Greenberg of The Philadelphia Inquirer
March 1, 2026
The non-sketchy, wholesome representatives of the privy digging community in Philadelphia are Melissa and Matt Dunphy, who call themselves “citizen archaeologists.” She’s a composer with a doctorate in music; he’s an e-commerce engineer.
They fell down the rabbit hole of privy digging about a decade ago after they bought a shuttered magic theater in Old City with a deed dating back to 1745 and began to renovate.
The construction workers uncovered two privies on their property, one of which the Dunphys excavated right away. Since then, they’ve dug six more privies in the vicinity and launched a podcast, The Boghouse, about their discoveries.
The two have become “obsessed at the level that now we give talks at Colonial Williamsburg,” Matt Dunphy said.
Their apartment, on the third floor of the former magic theater, is packed floor to ceiling with thousands upon thousands of shards of pottery and other artifacts. The bathroom has relics displayed on every wall, and the glass cabinets in the kitchen are filled not with matching plates but with broken teapots, chamber pots, punch bowls, and cups, each with their own carefully researched backstory.
The Dunphys are amateurs who have not formally studied archaeology, but they are brimming with intellectual curiosity and knowledge about what they’ve found.
They mostly don’t sell their discoveries (Melissa Dunphy has sold some found teeth) and are instead working to build a museum on the ground floor of the theater, which they hope to open by July. They want to call it “The Necessary Museum,” because privies were often called necessaries.
“These objects — even something as simple as a bowl — tell you something about the people who used them, the people who made them, the journey that that object took,” Melissa Dunphy said. “This is like a passing of stewardship of this little postage stamp-sized corner of the world.”
Unlike those who work in secret, the Dunphys are in close touch with archaeologists at the National Park Service and local museums, speak at archaeology conferences, and regularly text with the editor of the academic journal Ceramics in America, whom they consider a mentor.
When they first found glass bottles in the privy in their backyard back in 2016, they tried reaching out to various archaeologists and museums in the city asking how they should proceed, they said. But no one was particularly helpful, and they only had a week before the hole would be filled in.
So they set about trying to “rescue” as much as they could themselves.
“My assumption then was that this archaeology is probably everywhere in Philly, and it’s probably not that important. So I don’t have to feel academically guilty about doing it myself, without any real expertise,” Melissa Dunphy said. She descended the privy hole in a cobbled-together archaeological outfit: Duluth Trading Co. coveralls, a “Rosie the Riveter” scarf, a camping headlamp.
The couple fashioned screens from chicken wire they bought at Home Depot to sift pottery from dirt, and Matt Dunphy photoshopped a picture of a ruler he saw at the Museum of the American Revolution to measure the objects they uncovered.
Scott Stephenson, president of that museum, who in the years since has gotten to know the Dunphys well, said he supports people doing “citizen archaeology” alongside professionals.
[....]
The Dunphys acknowledge that they don’t document the stratigraphy, or the exact chronological layering, of the privies they have dug. But they also see themselves as democratizing an important effort, saving bits of the past that would otherwise be wholly lost. It’s not as if the city’s professional archaeologists have the time or ability to carefully dig every backyard under construction across Philadelphia.
“We have watched with our own eyes archaeological features being crushed up and destroyed during construction in our neighborhood,” Melissa Dunphy said.
On a recent afternoon, Matt Dunphy donned black rubber gloves, filled an Ikea strainer with sudsy water in the sink, and began to scrub pottery shards with a small denture brush. Centuries-old dirt trickled down the drain.
Next to him, pieces of clean pottery lay on a towel to dry. Many privy diggers don’t take the time to piece together the hundreds of broken pieces they find, because it can seem like a nearly impossible task. But Melissa Dunphy sees it as puzzle-making “boss level.” To repair a single ceramic bowl might take a week of 16-hour days, she said.
She uses painters tape to keep related pieces together, and when they seem to fit, she uses archival-grade museum glue diluted with a syringe full of acetone to seal them back together.
The thrill of bringing something back to life — it’s like nothing else.
“This is the first time that someone has seen this bowl,” she said, “the way that it’s supposed to be, in hundreds of years.”