Once the Metropolis of Maryland: Celebrating 50 Years of Archaeology at Historic St. Mary’s City

This symposium celebrates 50 years of archaeology conducted at Historic St. Mary’s City (HSMC), a museum of history and archaeology at Maryland’s first capital. In 1966, the newly-formed Historic St. Mary’s City Commission established a Research Department by hiring preeminent Chesapeake historian Lois Green Carr and began to gather resources related to Maryland’s past. The following year, Orin Bullock, and later J. Glenn Little and Stephen Israel, surveyed the 18th-century Captain John Hicks site, initiating the first museum-sponsored archaeological work at St. Mary’s City. In the decades since these efforts, HSMC staff members have conducted fieldwork around the museum’s property and analyzed the material culture they recovered, pioneering innovative archaeological techniques and revealing new details about life in early Maryland. The papers presented in this symposium honor this rich legacy of work while also sharing recent research conducted by the staff of HSMC’s Department of Research and Collections.