Excavating the Foundations of Representative Government: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Historical Archaeology.

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in 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.

Since 2016, the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeology team have been excavating the purported location of the first, and longest-meeting representative governmental body in English North America. Virginia’s General Assembly met for the first time in late July, 1619. Scant historical documentation indicates that this nascent form of democratic government met inside the 1617 church, a timber frame structure located in the ever-expanding colonial capital. The site was the focus of limited excavations from 1897 to 1906 with the express intention of defining the multiple iterations of churches on the site and high-status individuals buried within. This session explores and highlights the archaeological discoveries, analyses, and interpretations of these lost spaces.