Garden and Landscape Archaeology at the Robert Carter House in Williamsburg, Virginia
Author(s): Mark Kostro
Year: 2019
Summary
This is an abstract from the "Meaning in Material Culture" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
The Robert Carter House, built circa 1727 and restored by Colonial Williamsburg in 1931, is one of the largest domestic properties within the eighteenth century townsite. At a time when the best rooms in most gentry houses in town were oriented toward the front of the house, the best rooms at the Robert Carter House are at the back. A series of terraces or ‘falls’ behind the house further suggests the existence of a formal pleasure garden directly behind the house rather than the typical cluster of service buildings and servants’ quarters that characterized most Williamsburg back lots. Archaeological excavations in 2017 and 2018 were carried out with the aim of better understanding the unusual spatial arrangement of the property, including the garden’s eighteenth century layout and functions of the various outbuildngs through time.
Cite this Record
Garden and Landscape Archaeology at the Robert Carter House in Williamsburg, Virginia. Mark Kostro. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, St. Charles, MO. 2019 ( tDAR id: 449145)
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Keywords
General
Chesapeake
•
Garden Archaeology
•
Landscape
Geographic Keywords
United States of America
Temporal Keywords
18th-Century
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): 448