BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—An excavation at the one-time home of civil rights activist Malcolm X has yielded broken dishes, pieces of jewelry, toys, and a record from the 1940s that may have been thrown into the yard when the house was vandalized in the 1970s. Built in 1874, the house was occupied by an Irish immigrant family in the years before it was owned by Ella Little-Collins, Malcolm X’s half-sister. She took teenaged Malcolm Little in after his father’s death and mother’s hospitalization. Bagley and his team had thought the site had been used as farmland before 1874, but eighteenth-century artifacts suggest that there may have been a house on or near the site during the colonial era. “We’ve come onto a whole layer, roughly two feet down and across the whole site, that’s absolutely filled with stuff from the period,” Boston city archaeologist Joseph Bagley said in an Associated Press report. The excavation will continue next month. To read more about urban archaeology on the East Coast, go to "Letter From Philadelphia: City Garden."