In December 2004, the Historic New Orleans Collection decided to sponsor an archaeological and historical investigation of 535-537 Conti Street in the French Quarter. The Collection owns this property, presently occupied by an early-20th-century parking garage, and plans to build a new archival storage facility on the site. The structure will reconstruct a three-and-a-half story hotel built on the site in the 1820s. Although regulations rarely pertain to archaeology on private property nor does the state provide archaeological services in New Orleans, the Collection deems support of archaeological research to be consistent with its mission to preserve and promote the history of the city. This project is one of only six controlled excavations ever conducted on colonial-era archaeological deposits in the French Quarter and is rapidly becoming one of the most extensive.



Research on the site is ongoing, but the following discoveries, questions, and facts are of interest:

• Archaeologically, the most startling discovery made thus far is an apparently prehistoric level of Indian pottery, buried several inches below the earliest colonial-era deposits. Although there are a few historical references to Native Americans residing in the Bayou St. John area and other prehistoric deposits have been found along the lakeshore in the city, this is the first evidence of an Indian village in the location of the French Quarter. A preliminary interpretation is that the pottery dates to 1200-1600 A.D. Archaeologists are excavating further in hopes of finding organic-rich deposits that may yield a carbon-14 date.
• In the historic era, the site at 535-537 Conti Street saw many uses, among them:
  • a French colonial garden
  • a possible Spanish colonial residence (burned in 1794)
  • a guesthouse or inn run by a widow from 1796 to 1809
  • an early 19th-century coffeehouse and hotel
  • a hotel and tavern combination in a wooden frame structure, named "Rising Sun Hotel," operated 1821-1822 (burned in 1822)
  • a more upscale brick hotel with dining hall and billiards room replaced the Rising Sun, known variously as Richardson's Hotel, Conti Hotel, Verandah Hotel, built sometime between 1822 and 1828 (an 1853 painting of this building is the basis for the planned reconstruction)
  • a shirt factory and molasses plant in the late 19th century (fire damaged in 1887)
• The archaeologists will be learning more about daily life at the site through these phases of its history by:
  • analyzing microscopic seeds and other botanical evidence from the garden to learn what species early colonial settlers were planting, eating, and using as medicinals; the same analysis pertaining to kitchen refuse will be conducted on the three "burned" levels at the site (1794, 1822, 1887) as fire promotes preservation; animal bones representing the remains of past meals will also be identified
    
  • examining the unusually high number of 18th-century ceramics the site has yielded, which will help answer questions about the role of Indian trade and smuggling in the early colonial economy
    
  • analyzing and comparing deposits from the several hotel and entertainment businesses resident on the site, in order to better establish their socio-economic profile and what sort of activities occurred there.
• Although the research project is only about 20% completed, the excavation has already uncovered a deep public fantasy about the 'underworld' of New Orleans. There has been an intense media focus on the Rising Sun Hotel component of the site, which newspaper advertisements and reports indicate operated there from January 1821 until February 27, 1822. On that day, the entire building was consumed by a fire in which two men reportedly lost their lives in the ground-floor tavern. "Rising Sun" was a fairly common motif in the 18th and 19th centuries, used by English and American taverns, among other businesses. In New Orleans, a ship of that name docked in the port in 1808 while the Rising Sun coffeehouse operated on Decatur Street in 1838.

The old American folksong, "House of the Rising Sun," has played a prominent part in the way people have imagined New Orleans, with the lyrics most often interpreted as the words of a 'fallen woman' working in a brothel of that name. There is no clear evidence that "Rising Sun" was a euphemism for a bordello. The song has gone through several permutations over the years and probably has roots in an English folksong. It has come to mean whatever listeners want it to mean.

The same can be said of the archaeological site at 535 Conti. The tavern-hotel called "Rising Sun" is very well preserved in a fire-burned rubble level within the site. Among the artifacts coming from the layer are an unusually high number of faience rouge pots - or French cosmetics jars (three to four times the number found at residential sites of the same era). This is a finding that will require some further sleuthing to figure out what they were doing at a male-operated tavern and hotel that seems to have been serving the rowdier waterfront crowd. Although an advertisement for the hotel says that, "Gentlemen here may rely upon finding attentive Servants" and "the best entertainment," it requires the imagination to connect the dots between artifacts, archives, and lyrics. Most ethnomusicologists would agree that we will never know the ultimate origin of the song the "House of the Rising Sun," or even settle on a single 'correct' interpretation of its meaning, but many fans and tourists nevertheless fantasize about finding physical evidence of a titillating New Orleans myth.



New Orleans Times-Picayune
Digging dirt sheds light on old hotel

New Zealand Herald
There was a house they called the rising sun

Los Angeles Times
New Orleans Legend May Prove to Be Reputable

Lexington Herald Leader / Associated Press Wire
French Quarter dig searches for House of the Rising Sun