Identifying Source Deposits in Monticello’s South Pavilion

Summary

During the winter of 2016, archaeologists excavated the interior of Monticello’s South Pavilion in advance of restoration. The South Pavilion’s basement served as the original kitchen until 1808, when it was connected to the main house via the South Dependency Wing and repurposed into a wash house. In order to level the floors between the South Pavilion basement and the new, immediately adjacent wing, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved laborers used three feet of sediment to raise the basement floor. Recent excavations removed nearly a third of this fill. Preliminary analysis presented at the 2017 SHA Conference sought to establish a chronology for these South Pavilion deposits. Results also indicated a strong resemblance in both sediment and artifact composition to strata excavated in the nearby Kitchen Yard by Dr. William Kelso during the 1980s and re-analyzed in 2008. Using statistical analyses, this poster expands upon those findings to check the validity of one origin source for both the Kitchen Yard and South Pavilion deposits. Using a stratified random sample of Kitchen Yard deposits with established, pre-1809 depositional date ranges, we assess similarities in ceramic assemblages to the fill in the South Pavilion basement.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22466