Where did Gloucestertown go? Reconstructing the Disappearance of a Colonial Town

Summary

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 initiated. By tracing the ownership histories of more than a hundred parcels across 400 acres within and surrounding the Virginia Institute for Marine Science campus, we intended to reconstruct the town landscape during its final moments, immediately before the Civil War.  But as with so many projects at Gloucester Point, what we learned was far different than we expected.

Cite this Record

Where did Gloucestertown go? Reconstructing the Disappearance of a Colonial Town. David Brown, Thane H. Harpole, Stephen Fonzo, Colleen Betti, Erin S. Schwartz. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441122)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 886