Reproducible Methods for Linking Archaeological Contexts to Households at Monticello

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Chesapeake Landscapes in Transition", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Forty years of excavation at Monticello have yielded artifacts from thousands of contexts created by diverse taphonomic processes. These include spatially scattered quadrats in plowzone sites, lithostratigraphic units from sites with extensive horizontal stratification, and discrete features. This paper describes our efforts to develop reproducible methods for aggregating artifacts from these contexts into "counting units." These units are designed to contain artifacts discarded by a single household during an identifiable period, with sample sizes large enough to support reliable analyses. We present a reproducible workflow that reveals relationships among units defined as: clusters of assemblages based on type-frequency similarity, clusters of artifacts in 2-D space, and groups of stratified contexts representing major depositional events. Understanding these relationships allows us to assess how these units correspond to households, providing a foundation for further analysis. Data and R code will be available on the OSF website.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Historical Archaeology of Chesapeake Landscapes in Transition

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow