NEW YORK, NY August 11, 2005 —Head into Central Park, from the West 85th Street entrance, and cross West Drive, and, chances are, you may find yourself standing on top of an old toilet. A really old, 19th century toilet... now buried deep beneath the grass under your feet.

REPORTER: If the thought makes the average person recoil, it thrills Professor Larry Conyers.

CONYERS: It’s probably filled full of all kinds of good stuff that people dumped in the outhouse. Some things they wanted to hide, that they didn’t want anybody else to know about. It’s actually a good place to throw it.

REPORTER: Professor Conyers is a geophysicist from the University of Denver. He’s helping a team of scholars look for what’s left of Seneca Village, a 19th century African-American settlement that used to span five acres in what is now the west-central portion of Central Park. And he looks by using a ground-penetrating radar. It’s connected by cables to a laptop computer. Professor Conyers points to gray and white lines on the screen, to what he says is a house.

CONYERS: there it is right there, I know it just looks like squiggles to you. But what each one of those are is a separate reflection off of individual stones and probably parts of the chimney and floorboards and other kinds of materials that were bulldozed, and then they wanted to get rid of that stuff, and what better place to put it than in the gullies.

REPORTER: Scholars with the Seneca Village Project, a joint effort between Barnard College, City College, and the New-York Historical Society, knew they’d find something here. They have old maps, and soil borings they took last fall. But they didn’t know exactly what, and exactly where. And that exactness is important, because they’d like to excavate some parts of the village, to learn more about how its inhabitants lived.

NAN ROTHSCHILD: This community is important because it was a middle class African American community.

REPORTER: Nan Rothschild is a professor of anthropology at Barnard College.

ROTHSCHILD: If you wanted to vote and you were black after 1820, you needed to own property. And so this was affordable land. The community had three churches, it had a school. Some of its residents were part of the abolition movement. So we’re interested the way of life in this community, what it would have been like for the people who lived here, how it would have been different from poorer communities.

REPORTER: But to get beyond the maps, and the squiggles on the radar…to get to the old bits of pottery and medicine jars and farm implements…what scholars call the “material culture”…requires excavating the privy or the ravine, or whatever else the Seneca Village Project members find today and tomorrow during their radar survey. And digging up the park makes parks officials nervous.

DOUGLAS BLONSKY: there’s one frame of thought, if you have an incredible amount of information, if you have maps, surveys, and if you have documents, so there’s an incredible amount of validation saying that it’s there, and there’s a school of thought that if you know all this information, there’s no reason to do a dig.

REPORTER: That’s Douglas Blonsky. He’s the president of the Central Park Conservancy, which raises money for Central Park and manages it, under a contract with the city. He says he’s afraid of setting a precedent for other scholars armed with old maps and questions.

Blonsky: There’s an awful lot of other things that are in the park, that pre-date the park. There’s Revolutionary War forts, that’s a convent that was in the park. And, listen I’m not an archeologist. But I’ve talked to other archeologists that say, if you have all this information, there’s nothing that really merits digging it up and you should just leave well enough alone and actually keep the site protected.

REPORTER: Blonsky says the team’s work so far has not revealed anything new. Meanwhile, the scholars think otherwise. They have documented what has only been hinted at…and the really new things would be revealed by excavating some select sites, like the ravine, or that old outhouse. Professor Rothschild believes you can serve history, and serve the park, at the same time

Rothschild: Naturally, we would restore it to the way it was. We would target very limited areas, one meter square at a time. From our point of view – but of course, we’re archeologists – from our point of view, that would be a really important kind of information, because it’s not just African American history, it’s really part of the city’s history.

REPORTER: The Seneca Village team says it will use the information from their radar survey to pick places that may yield the most fruitful information, and ask the park for permission to dig. The Central Park Conservancy’s president says he hasn’t ruled out granting that permission. But he wants to wait and see if an excavation of that 19th century outhouse is truly merited.

(Reporting assistance on this story from Michael Jones and Dan Blumberg.)