Virginia (Other Keyword)
26-43 (43 Records)
Dr. Stephen Potter has a long-standing interest in Great Falls Park, a unit of the George Washington Memorial Parkway (GWMP), in Virginia. The park is located in the Potomac Gorge, a rocky area where rapids divide the upper and lower Potomac River valley. Breathtaking in its beauty, Great Falls was also an important feature of the Native American and Colonial era landscapes. The falls were able to be crossed, but not without difficulty and danger. Native American petroglyphs are concentrated in...
Reexamination of a Small Prehistoric Site in Southeastern Virginia (2017)
Fort Eustis, a small military installation in southeastern Virginia, has over one hundred sites containing prehistoric components, most of which yielded no diagnostic artifacts when identified at the survey level. These sites were subsequently labeled as camps of indeterminate time period and assumed to have little research potential. A recent reinvestigation of one of these supposedly insignificant sites yielded a large quantity of debitage, along with ceramic sherds, concentrated within a very...
Return to Martin’s Hundred: The Archaeology of a Mid-Seventeenth Century Virginia Houselot (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Research of the 17th Century Chesapeake" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In March of 1622, nearly a third of Virginia’s English population was killed in a surprise attack by the local Powhatan with the goal of hampering the English expansion efforts, and to reassert their supremacy over the newcomers. Martin’s Hundred, a fortified settlement founded by the English four years earlier, and...
Rising from the Dark Marshes: Investigations of an Elite Homestead on Mulberry Island, Virginia (2017)
Mulberry Island, a peninsula on Virginia’s James River and home to Joint Base Langley-Eustis’ Fort Eustis, is a trove of cultural resources. Among its more than 230 archaeological sites are dozens of indentured, enslaved, and tenant laborers’ ephemeral homesteads. Relatively few sites associated with its economically advantaged minority have been discovered on Mulberry Island, leaving a gap in the archaeological record compounded by the loss of antebellum public records during the Civil War....
Roads of Rebellion and Resistance: Tracing English and Indigenous Paths Across Virginia’s Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Land Unto Itself: Virginia's Northern Neck, Colonialism, And The Early Atlantic", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677) was the first wide-scale armed insurrection in English America. Trouble began in 1675 in Virginia’s Northern Neck with retaliatory raids between colonial militias and Native Americans. While some settlers dug in, fortifying their plantations, others rallied behind...
Section 106, FCC Guidelines, and Small Project Area Archaeology: Little Footprints can Find Significant Sites (2016)
This paper explores the role of Section 106 compliance in small projects, such as telecommunications facilities, city parks, and fiber routes. Often thought of as less significant by regulatory agencies, state historic preservation offices, and CRM firms themselves, small scale archaeology is capable of identifying national register eligible sites, and can play a critical role in examining areas that have been heavily developed by the private sector and therefore not previously subjected to the...
Sharing the Story: Developing Collaborative Educational Experiences at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Over the past thirty years, Poplar Forest has established a strong tradition of public outreach and education as part of its archaeological research program. Recently, archaeologists working in collaboration with Poplar Forest’s African American Advisory Group along with other staff, scholars, and consultants have guided the...
Stew Stoves in the British Atlantic: An Example from Monticello (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of the Mid-Atlantic (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1789 enslaved chef James Hemings prepared elite French cuisine at Monticello on one of the earliest stew stoves in Virginia. His owner, Thomas Jefferson, had taken Hemings to Paris five years earlier to be trained in preparing French cuisine. Recently archaeologists at Monticello excavated Monticello's first...
Style and Substance: Button Production, Use, and Choice at the Buffalo Forge Iron Plantation (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. When several different types of buttons are recovered from an archaeological site, how can we parse and explain differences in choice and use? And what might we learn about the different people who made, used, or reused them? This paper explores these questions through study of a diverse button assemblage recovered from two women’s...
A Tale of Two Privies: Interpreting Daily Life and Education at the Williamsburg Bray School (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Established in 1760 with support from a London-based philanthropy called The Associates of Dr. Bray, the Williamsburg Bray School was one of the earliest institutions dedicated to the education of free and enslaved African American children in America. The school’s curriculum was designed to teach students Anglican catechism and...
A Teardrop Shaped Foundation In Fairfax County, Virginia (2016)
The Old Colchester Park and Preserve, located in southern Fairfax County, Virginia consists of approximately 145 acres along the Occoquan River. This natural and cultural resource Park was acquired by Fairfax County Park Authority in 2006. Located within the Park along the Occoquan River was the ca. 1754-1830 tobacco port town of Colchester. Systematic and targeted testing over the past four years by Colchester Archaeology Research Team (CART) has yielded numerous artifacts and features. ...
To be, Rather Than to Seem: Comparative Colonialism and the Idea of the Old North State. (2015)
North Carolina has often been described as "a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit" a sentiment also reflected in the official state motto "to be rather than to seem." The idea that North Carolina was markedly different from either of its colonial neighbors has been almost universally accepted. The contrast has been forwarded by North Carolinians for generations, from historians to presidential candidates. For example, the often cited lack of a deep-water port has been used to...
Towards Food Independence: Faunal Remains from a Post-Starving Time Well at Jamestown (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Opening the Vault: What Collections Can Say About Jamestown’s Global Trade Network", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Previous faunal analysis at Jamestown focused on the first years of settlement, the Starving Time, and the post 1620s. A gap existed during the period immediately following the Starving Time when martial law, conflicts with Virginia Indians, and the reintroduction of livestock affected the...
A Trail of Tools: An Analysis Exploring the Procurement, Use, and Repair of Agricultural Tools at George Washington's Mount Vernon (2017)
During his lifetime, George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate spanned 8,000 acres and encompassed five separate farms, four of which were used for large-scale cultivation of field crops. The exception was Mansion House Farm, where the only cultivation consisted of kitchen gardens, vineyards, and some agricultural experimentation. Yet a substantial number of iron agricultural tools have been found archaeologically. This study addresses the anomaly by focusing specifically on the agricultural hoes...
Uncovering German Identity on the Colonial Virginia Frontier (2017)
Archaeological excavations began during the summer of 2016 at Fort Germanna, an 18th century piedmont Virginia fort. The fort was built in 1714 at the bequest of Governor Alexander Spotswood to expand the western frontier of Virginia. Fort Germanna was only in existence for 4 years, from 1714-1718, and inhabited by German miners brought to Virginia by Spotswood to set up an iron mine. While building the research agenda for this project we consider how a German ethnicity and identity could be...
Understanding the Materials and Methods Used in the Construction of the 1617 Church at Jamestown, Virginia (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Excavating the Foundations of Representative Government: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Historical Archaeology." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From 2016 to 2018 Jamestown Rediscovery excavated the 1907 Memorial Church where the foundations of: 1) a 1617 timber-framed church and 2) a 1640s brick and mortar church are located. The 1617 church is where the first legislative assembly in British North...
Where did Gloucestertown go? Reconstructing the Disappearance of a Colonial Town (2018)
Despite more than 40 years of historical and archaeological research on Gloucester Point, the placement of the colonial town grid on the modern landscape is still unclear. The piecemeal nature of projects resulted in untestable hypotheses based on individual buildings and modern landscape features, rather than stitching together archaeological data from projects from across this area. While the construction of a comprehensive GIS is underway, and discussed next, an alternative track was...
Whose Midden is it Anyway? : Exploring the Origins of the Southwest Yard Midden at James Madison's Montpelier (2016)
During the 2014 field season, the Montpelier Archaeology Department sampled an area known as the Southwest Yard. A large midden containing approximately 14,300 individual faunal elements and fragments was found. The Southwest Yard is located in close proximity to the domestic enslaved living and working area known as the South Yard, suggesting the midden could belong to the enslaved community. Within the South Yard, however, is an 18th century kitchen known as the South Kitchen. I will look at...