Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture

PROJECT Uploaded by: Gregory Brown

The Bennett’s Point (18QU28) site represents the principal dwelling at a colonial period tobacco plantation located in Queen Anne’s County, Maryland. The home of Elizabeth and Richard Bennett III between 1700 and 1749, Bennett’s Point was also a major port. Bennett was a lawyer, planter, merchant and one of the wealthiest men in the colony. The Bennett’s Point collection represents the domestic core of a large tobacco plantation, one of a very few early to mid-18th-century household sites...

PROJECT Al Luckenbach.

Homewood's Lot (18AN871) is located off Whitehall Creek near the Chesapeake Bay in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Continuously occupied since 1650, Homewood's Lot is one of eight known sites associated with the Puritan town of Providence (1649) (Luckenbach 1995). James Homewood arrived in Providence in 1649 and, in 1650, a parcel of land was laid out for him. James' brother, John Homewood, lived on Homewood's Lot until his death in 1681/82, leaving the land to his wife Sarah and first nephew,...

PROJECT Al Luckenbach.

The Burle's Town Land Site (18AN826) is located within the 17th-century settlement of Providence in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Providence had been settled primarily by a group of Puritans invited by Lord Baltimore to Maryland in 1649. The colony’s Act Concerning Religion, passed that same year, guaranteed that the Puritans would not be harassed for their religious beliefs as they had been in Virginia. While the relationship between the newly arrived settlers at Providence and the Maryland...

PROJECT Al Luckenbach.

The Chalkley site (18AN711) represents the remains of a small planter’s earthfast dwelling and is located in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Occupied for less than a decade by tobacco planter Thomas Jeffe, Jr. and his family, the site revealed evidence of a simple 16 ½-x-20 foot earthfast dwelling. Artifacts, along with archaeological and documentary evidence, suggest Jeffe Jr. built and occupied this earthfast dwelling with his wife Mary between 1677 and 1685. Observation of the surrounding area...

PROJECT Al Luckenbach.

The Chaney’s Hills site is located in Riva, southern Anne Arundel County, Maryland. The 3.7-acre site lies within the southwestern portion of an 89.7-acre parcel south of Governor’s Bridge Road and west of Riva Road, located near Flat Creek, a tributary of the South River. Chaney’s Hills was occupied by Richard Chaney and his wife Charity from 1658 until just before his death in 1686. Chaney's will indicates that he had three daughters and three sons. His probate inventory indicated that he had...

PROJECT Dennis J. Pogue.

King’s Reach (18CV83), part of the plantation known as “St. Leonard,” is a tobacco plantation homelot site occupied from 1690 until 1711 in Calvert County, Maryland. The site is located on the grounds of the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum (JPPM) and is associated with a nearby quarter (18CV84) and large tobacco barn (18CV85). King’s Reach is probably the home of Richard Smith, Jr., a wealthy colonist with close ties to the Calvert family. Documentary evidence suggests that Smith probably...

PROJECT Julia King.

The Patuxent Point site (18CV271) was the domestic core of an approximately 100-acre tobacco plantation occupied from c.1658 through the 1690s in Calvert County, Maryland. Excavations at the site revealed an earthfast dwelling, borrow pits, an ash-filled pit, middens, post holes, post molds, and eighteen human graves. Patuxent Point is situated approximately 800 feet east of the Compton site (18CV279), and their relationship to each other is still being investigated. The Patuxent Point site...

PROJECT Uploaded by: Gregory Brown

The Compton Site (18CV279) is a mid-17th-century tobacco plantation located near the mouth of the Patuxent River at Solomons in Calvert County, Maryland. The traces of at least two earthfast structures and post and rail fencing dating between 1651 and 1685 were uncovered in advance of residential construction. William and Magdalen Stevens acquired the Compton Site in 1651, when they are believed to have come to Maryland from Virginia. The Stevens and their children remained at the site until...

PROJECT Uploaded by: Gregory Brown

Mattapany (18ST390) was the 17th-century home of Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore and Proprietor of Maryland, as well as the location of the colony’s main weapons magazine. The site, once part of a 1200-acre manor, is located near the mouth of the Patuxent River aboard what is today the Naval Air Station Patuxent River. Although documentary evidence indicates that Europeans had established a presence on the property by 1637, it appears that 18ST390 was first occupied around 1663, when...

PROJECT Julia King.

The Posey Site (18CH281) is located near Mattawoman Creek in Charles County, Maryland, aboard what is now the Naval Surface Warfare Center–Indian Head Division. The site was initially identified in 1963 by Navy chemist Calvert Posey, in an area that had been damaged by an earlier explosion at Indian Head’s Biazzi Nitration Plant, where nitroglycerin was manufactured. In 1985, the site was tested by William Barse as part of a much larger archaeological survey of the Indian Head facility. The site...

PROJECT Howard MacCord.

The Camden archaeological site (44CE3) is located on the south side of the Rappahannock River approximately 2.5 miles east of Port Royal in Caroline County, Virginia. It was excavated in the 1960s, under the supervision of Howard A. MacCord (1969). The site was occupied by Virginia Indians from c. 1650 until c. 1690, and was part of a much larger complex of Native American settlement that occurred in this area during the 17th century. Twenty sites, including 44CE3, are located in an...

PROJECT Fraser Neiman.

Summary of Documentary Evidence and Intra-site Chronology (Adapted from material provided by Fraser D. Neiman) The Clifts Plantation (44WM33) is located on the south shore of the Potomac River in Westmoreland County, Virginia. The site lies on a tract of land now owned by the Robert E. Lee Memorial Association, Inc., a group devoted to the preservation of Stratford Hall, the 18th-century mansion that was the birthplace of Robert E. Lee. The site was excavated over a three-year period, from...

PROJECT Julia King.

The Old Chapel Field site (18ST233) is part of an early Jesuit settlement located south of St. Mary’s City in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. St. Inigoes Manor, as the settlement was known historically, was in Jesuit hands by 1637. St. Inigoes served as their mission’s headquarters and home plantation throughout the 17th century. In addition, a fort was built there by 1637, in an effort to protect the fledgling colony from naval attack. This fort was large enough to accommodate the local population...

PROJECT Uploaded by: Gregory Brown

The sites associated with the early 17th-century settlement known as Jordan’s Journey were located at Jordan’s Point near the confluence of the James and Appomatox rivers in Prince George’s County, Virginia. The property was initially occupied by Weyanoke Indians, one of the groups that formed the Powhatan chiefdom. About 1620, Samuel Jordan, his wife, Cecily, her two daughters, and their adult male servants took up residence at Jordan’s Point; this occupation is probably archaeological site...

PROJECT Uploaded by: Gregory Brown

Rich Neck was one of the founding plantations of Middle Plantation, the Lower Peninsula community that preceded Williamsburg. Rich Neck’s architectural sophistication and elaborate layout set it apart from nearly all of its colonial neighbors. Started in 1636 by Richard Kemp, the Secretary of the Colony, the plantation grew to over 4,000 acres in size by the middle of the seventeenth century. Richard Kemp and his wife Elizabeth built two structures executed entirely in brick, a rarity in 1640s...

PROJECT Seth Mallios.

Archaeological site 44JC568 (also known as the Reverend Richard Buck site, after the property’s first owner) was located about one-half mile north of Jamestown. 44JC568 was occupied from c. 1630 until c. 1650 by a series of individuals, many of them descended from Reverend Buck. Although close to Jamestown, in an area known as Neck-of-Land, the site was not located directly on navigable water. Archaeologist Seth Mallios has described Neck-of-Land as a “leading Jamestown suburb,” with 145...

PROJECT Seth Mallios.

Archaeological site 44JC802 was located atop an 85 foot bluff overlooking the James River in James City County, Virginia, approximately five miles east of Jamestown. 44JC802 was occupied from c. 1630 until c. 1650, although the identification of the site’s residents is unclear. The land on which the site was located, an approximately 400 acre tract, appears to have been in the possession of Edward Grendon by 1628 (and possibly as early as 1624). At his death in 1628, Grendon left the property...

PROJECT Uploaded by: Gregory Brown

Carter’s Grove Site 8—also known as CG-8 (44JC647)—is part of the Martin’s Hundred settlement, located on the James River in James City County, Virginia. The site was probably occupied sometime in the second quarter of the 17th century and abandoned by c. 1650, at a time when the price of tobacco had dropped in Virginia. Its occupants appear to have been at the lower end of the economic scale, in contrast with the Martin’s Hundred residents described by Ivor Noël Hume in his book, Martin’s...

PROJECT Julia King.

Using detailed comparisons of the archaeological assemblages from 18 early sites in the Chesapeake, this project explores the material conditions of culture contact, plantation development and organization, the rise of slavery, and consumer behavior. Comparable artifact databases have been created for the 18 sites, and analysis of artifact distributions has provided great insight into differences and similarities.