"Plundered & [not entirely] carried away": Coarse Earthenwares and Tobacco Pipes from the "Rebellion Pit" at Bacon’s Castle

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Constructed between 1665 and 1675, the Virginia plantation house known as “Bacon’s Castle” gained notoriety when it was seized during the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion conflict. The protracted, destructive nature of this event, and the rapid clean-up that ensued even as construction of the surrounding landscape continued, left distinctive archaeological traces. Among these is a refuse pit which remains the largest and best-preserved 17th-century feature/deposit excavated to-date at a site plagued by stratigraphic disturbance and a highly fragmentary artifact record. Remarkable as the Rebellion connection is, the deposit is most remarkable for the glimpses it affords into the materiality of everyday life in the colonial Chesapeake during a transitional, ultimately pivotal, era. Local and imported goods "plundered," but evidently not all "carried away" in the siege, were the focus of a study combining a critical analysis of legacy material with past findings, adding context and complexity to understandings of this site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow