Re-Cataloguing Artifacts from George Washington’s Blacksmith Shop

Summary

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The blacksmith shop at George Washington’s Mount Vernon has been the subject of six excavations between 1936 and 2007. Research and analysis of these excavations has primarily focused on reconstructing the blacksmith shop and specific blacksmithing activities. Despite the reconstruction of the shop in 2009, there remain significant questions about the daily lives of the enslaved individuals who lived and worked in and around the blacksmith shop, an area adjacent to other dependencies and a row of enslaved individuals’ living quarters. As part of larger reanalysis of the multiple excavations which seeks to answer these persisting questions, artifacts will be re-catalogued to record a wider range of information about each. This paper will focus on the results of this re-cataloguing process and explore spatial distributions and concentrations of different artifact types to consider how the activity of those working in the blacksmith shop connected with the surrounding domestic landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2020 SHA General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 683