You never saw this on "Little House on the Prairie."

Prior to regular garbage collection, which began in the 20th century, people just tossed their useless items out of a convenient door or window, and left them there.

"People's ideas of cleanliness were a lot different than they are now," says Brighton town historian Mary Jo Lanphear. "They put up with a lot of nasty smells that we probably would've gone running, screaming from."

That pile of household waste is called a "midden," and it's a potential gold mine for archaeologists. They use the bits of bone, glass, ceramics, and other artifacts to piece together a story that is simultaneously about one family's everyday life and the way of life for an entire community at a certain point in time.

"And that's where you start to talk about the research potential of a site: what was going on at that time and what does that tell you about the local, regional, and national situation?" says Mark Ewing of the Rochester Museum & Science Center.

Ewing is an archaeologist and manager of the Regional Heritage Preservation Program through the RMSC. In late May and early June, Ewing's team was working on an old farm adjacent to Buckland Park in Brighton, digging up ceramics, bone, bottles, and even a porcelain doll's head, found in pieces.

"It's kind of neat," says archaeologist Andy Graupman. "There's a little piece of ear there, and a little piece of ear there."

When you put the pieces together, a maker's mark appears, revealing that the head came from a German doll-making company that operated from the 1890's to the 1930's.

"I enjoy finding anything," Graupman says. "But the stuff where you can kind of link it to people is kind of interesting."

Ewing and his staff bid competitively on jobs throughout the Northeast, guiding clients - often developers or municipalities - through archaeological, architectural, and historical compliance issues.

"The developer foots the bill," Ewing says. "They don't like it, but they have to do it because it's part of their permitting process."

Ewing's team provides archaeological reviews to make sure the history and culture of chosen sites are protected before development begins. The reviews are required for projects that are funded, licensed, or approved by state or federal agencies.

The archaeology team has a love-hate relationship with developers, Ewing says. If a developer gets Ewing involved in the process early on, things can run smoothly. Too often, though, it doesn't work that way.

"We're immediately the bad guy because we're putting them behind schedule, when in reality it's because they did not plan properly," Ewing says.

The first thing Ewing's team does is evaluate the site. If they determine that it does have archaeological potential, the next step is to define the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the site and to decide whether or not there are real research opportunities.

"Is it a pristine example?" Ewing says, as an example of the kinds of questions his team will ask. "Does it have the potential to provide so much more information than other sites of that type?"

The third phase is data recovery or impact mitigation.

"Nobody likes to hear that," Ewing says. "What you're saying is that you are going to preserve a portion of this site for future reference."

The progression from phase to phase is accompanied, Ewing says, by an almost exponential increase in cost.

There is an abundance of information available about Brighton's historic Buckland House, but very little to be found about the adjacent property - the old Groos farmstead - even though the former owners of both were partners in the dairy and cattle industry for many years, Lanphear says.

The reason for the void: a land dispute between the longtime owner of the Groos land at 1435 Westfall Road and the new-ish owners of the property, the Town of Brighton. A settlement was ultimately reached, giving the town the land it wanted to expand Buckland Park. Overall, the town owns about 120 acres in that area, developed and undeveloped, says Tom Low, Brighton's commissioner of public works.

Max Gonsenhauer and Max Groos joined forces in the late 1940's, Lanphear says, owning side-by-side farms on Westfall up until the 1990's.

Today, the deserted Groos property primarily consists of a boarded up, dilapidated house; several barns in varying conditions; an old milk house; and a tenant quarters.

The property is the largest undeveloped parcel in the Town of Brighton, Lanphear says.

Brighton officials hired Ewing's team to do an archaeological review of 1435 Westfall just in case the town decides to one day develop the land for a new recreation center, more ball fields, or something else.

"If there's something that has to be preserved or protected, or documented and relocated or whatever, we've got to know that," Low says. "So we find out now, so when we're making our development plans three years from now, we know what we've got to do."

The first phase of the archaeological review, performed last summer, turned up artifacts from the mid 1800's to the 1980's, concentrated around the main house and the tenant house, Ewing says. The decision was made to proceed to Phase 2, which was carried out this spring.

The goal is to eventually arrive at a recommendation: Does the site have the potential to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Making the list is "a pat on the head," Lanphear says, and it enables the town to apply for grants for the property. There are other benefits, as well.

"But when it comes right down to it in a lot of cases, just because a structure is listed on the National Register does not mean it's protected from destruction," Graupman says.

The Buckland House is not eligible for the National Register because it was compromised by its rehabilitation. But the Groos structures are pristine, in their own way.

"This house is untouched by meddling hands, and so we're kind of hoping that maybe this will make it," Lanphear says.

Lanphear has trouble imagining a use for the property, though, if it were to be preserved.

"It really would have to have a purpose and have some use," she says. "I can't see it as just another museum. We in the town can't operate museums; we are responsible to the taxpayers."

The Groos property - set back from the road and shielded by trees and overgrowth - is beautiful and wretched: an anachronistic jumble. Books, magazines, beer cans, furniture, and other items clutter the barns - modern filling in early 20th century shells. The junk shares space with territorial swallows and starlings. Taggers have hit one of the barns; the same barn has deer legs hanging from the ceiling.

"I'm not sure I'd want to be in here when there's a 70 mile-per-hour wind," Ewing says, citing the glass, wood, and other debris.

The main house was originally a one-story structure that's been split into two apartments.

"This house has been hacked apart and put back together several times," probably with the rising fortunes of the farm, says Scott Crowder, assistant manager of the RHPP.

The house first shows up on maps in 1852, he says, and before the intrusion of Route 590, the land most likely extended all the way to the canal. A viable diary operation would have required hundreds of acres of land, Crowder says.

The tenant house in the rear of the property is another story; it's much smaller and almost completely overgrown. There are at least three roofs on the place - one on top of the other.

"On this structure you can see multiple episodes of, 'let's keep this thing standing,'" Graupman says.

The tenant house was periodically vacant and periodically occupied by tenant farmers and farm managers over the life of the farm.

"It's part of a package deal: 'We'll give you housing as well as a wage,'" Ewing says. "It's a pretty smart move, because you've got your help right there."

It's a rare 80-plus degree day in May, and the turkey vultures swooping overheard are shamelessly optimistic.

"They're waiting for us to drop," Ewing says.

Ewing, Crowder, and Graupman have set up on the east side of the main house on the former Groos property; the grounds around that house and the tenant house showed the most promise during Phase 1 of the archaeological review.

"Don't tell her about the gold!" jokes Ewing, as Graupman leads me to the truck so I can see the artifacts they discovered earlier.

Here's how it works: Ewing's team cuts the ground into standardized test units, and then soil is removed and placed in 10-meter buckets, so they know exactly how much is being taken out. They dump the soil, one bucket at a time, onto a tripod sifter: three wood beams lashed together at the top with rope so that it looks like the exoskeleton of a tepee. The sifter hangs down from the tripod like a swing. A member of the team rapidly and roughly pushes the screen back and forth to weed out as much extraneous dirt as possible, and then digs through the remaining dirt with his hands and his ever-present trowel.

They're finding ceramics, nails, cut bone, bottle and window glass, and other artifacts. The bits of glass and ceramics gleam and aren't too difficult to spot in the clumps of dirt. Bones, though, are easy to miss, or for an amateur to mistakenly discard as worthless pieces of rock.

Even the smallest artifact can include hints to its origin or use, like a maker's mark or a distinctive pattern.

"The midden allows us to learn a lot," Crowder says. "It may have been their trash pile, but it has all kinds of dateable artifacts, diagnostic artifacts that allow us to temporally date a site and an occupation period."

If you've been doing this awhile, you can hear an artifact before you spot it in the sifter. And you've probably already got a good guess about what you've found.

"You're going through with your trowel, and all of a sudden you hear 'dink.' You don't even see it, but you know it's there," Ewing says. "You can hear the difference in what the trowel hits."

The artifacts are plucked from the sifter and placed in a nearby bucket, where they clink together like cheap wind chimes. Eventually they're bagged, labeled, and taken back to a lab at the RMSC, where the analysis begins.

Context is everything. If the site is undisturbed, artifacts should be deposited in a natural layer system, with the most modern items closest to the surface and the oldest stuff at the bottom. The dig is recorded in painstaking detail so that an artifact density is established. Gradually - and everything in archaeology takes place gradually - a picture begins to emerge, and the pages of history turn right before your eyes.

Take animal bones as an example. You'd expect to find the bones of wild game like turkey and deer closer to the bottom, because that's what early settlers ate. Later on, chicken and cow bones begin to show up in the midden, which tell you that the farm and quite possibly the area are thriving and that the wild animal population has been depleted.

If the cuts on the bones are standardized, it probably means that the meat was bought at a market and the animal was not slaughtered on the farm.

"So you start to see this transition into the market economy and how they're getting their food supplies," Ewing says. "Somebody that's killing a cow in their back yard probably won't cut it up like a butcher would cut it up."

What you find and where you find it can also tell you something about socioeconomic status as well as provide much other information.

"Are we seeing nice, fine porcelains?" Ewing says. "Are we seeing imported goods, which would indicate, possibly, a higher-status person? Then you try to tie it in with records; find out everything you can about that farmstead: How many acres? Who lived there? What crops did they grow? What kind of livestock? You try to mesh recovered materials with the historical record, and come up with a picture of what was really going on."

The artifacts found in the midden can also reconstruct a site as it once existed, even if there's nothing left but dirt. If you're finding cut animal bones, for example, you're probably standing outside what was once somebody's kitchen.

Understanding the critical role of context in archaeological work makes the plundering of artifacts - with Egypt as a notable example - all the more deplorable.

"If they just pull artifacts out of some place, then it really doesn't tell you anything other than it's a pretty artifact," Graupman says.

Funny story: There used to be a city school where Frontier Field is now. RMSC was a cramped city museum at the time and used the school for off-site storage. But the school closed and the forgotten RMSC artifacts were still inside the building when it was demolished.Jump forward a number of years and RMSC gets hired to do the archaeology review for Frontier Field.

"We start going down, and all of a sudden we start to come across Native American material," Ewing says, remembering the initial panic that maybe the school had been built on an important Native American site.

But then they noticed an ink number on an artifact, and recognized it as an accession number from when the item was accessioned into the museum's collection back in the 1930's.

"We came back and checked records, and sure enough, there was a block of material that was missing from the collection that we had records on, and nobody knew where it had been," Ewing says. "It was fortuitous that we chose where we chose to dig and we hit the closet in this school where that material had been stored and lost, and re-found."

Found artifacts initially belong to the client, Ewing says. But if it's a critical piece, clients are usually eager to turn it over to the museum for preservation. Sometimes clients like to keep one or two of the sexier finds for display, Ewing says.

The Regional Heritage Preservation Program keeps the artifacts, although most items don't make the museum's collection.

"Unless it's something really, really cool, it's usually not going to go on display," Graupman says. "What we tend to find is for research purposes."

Graupman's most exciting discovery - made on another dig - was a medicine bottle that once belonged to a homeopathic physician. The bottle was found in an area where there used to be tenant housing, which makes sense because the people living there probably couldn't afford a more mainstream physician.

"It doesn't sound cool," Graupman says. "But just the whole history behind it was what was kind of cool to me."

When some people think "archaeology," they envision exotic locales and Indiana Jones, he says.

"When I was going to marry my wife, her parents said, ‘You're going to marry an archaeologist? He's going to be in Egypt all the time,'" Graupman says. "No one realizes that there's archaeology across the region and across the United States."