Digging the Anacostia River Landscape: Geoarchaeology and the Buried Past in the National Capital

Summary

The historic Anacostia River valley was a focal point for settlement by local Native American populations as well as European Colonial and post-Colonial populations. However, the valley floor had low-topographic relief, large marshes, and soils prone to erosion, leading to many grand efforts of dredging and land reclamation. Flooding led to further raising of the landscape in the early 20th century, and to the deeper burial of archaeological sites. Fortunately, the Anacostia River valley was well-mapped in the 19th and 20th centuries, and 3D approaches to landscape visualization have recently allowed archaeologists to model the historic valley in the last half of the nineteenth century. Models of fill thickness have been generated and tested through geoarchaeological borings and trenches. While the effort is piecemeal and being refined, the landscape approach with GIS modeling has yielded encouraging results.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22619