Modeling Labor at a President’s House: Using 3D Technology to Document the Construction of an 18th Century Plantation Main House

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Race, Racism, and Montpelier" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Montpelier Foundation in partnership with University of Arkansas’s Center for Advanced Spatial Technology are working together to make the history and archaeology of James Madison’s Montpelier estate accessible to the public in an innovative way. Funded by the Institute for Museum Library Science, this work combines 3D modeling, GIS software, and years of archaeological and and architectural investigations of the Montpelier main house into a single user-friendly, online platform. This technology allows a new narrative to evolve revealing the labor that went into the constructing the Madison family home. A key part of this conceptualization is working against a more narrowly defined sense of place that sees the owner as the key actor in the design, use, and construction of the main house.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Race, Racism, and Montpelier   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology