A Landscape Revealed: New Analysis of Surface Finds from Fort Delaware

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "“We Go to Gain a Little Patch of Ground. That hath in it no profit but the name”: Revolutionary Research in Archaeologies of Conflict" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

From 1993 to 1996, Delaware State Park employees conducted a shoreline survey of the quickly

eroding beaches around Fort Delaware, a Civil War prisoner camp located on Pea Patch Island

in the Delaware River. By the mid-1990s, erosion exposed the 19th century landscape that had

previously been buried, revealing thousands of artifacts and the foundations of several

buildings. The flooded shores had once been dry ground used by Union forces and civilians as

officer’s quarters, shops, and laborer’s shanties. The controlled survey resulted in the collection

of nearly 11,000 remarkably intact artifacts, which are currently being catalogued and analyzed

for the first time by the Veterans Curation Program (VCP) in Alexandria, Virginia. In this paper,

we utilize historic records and artifact analysis to better understand what the archaeological

record can tell us about life in and around a Civil War prisoner camp.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• “We Go to Gain a Little Patch of Ground. That hath in it no profit but the name”: Revolutionary Research in Archaeologies of Conflict   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 615