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NARRATOR: UT Anthropology assistant professor
Barbara Heath is using archaeology to try
to give a voice to a community who would otherwise
go largely unheard: the 18th century slaves
of Virginia.
HEATH: There’s been a fair amount of archaeology
done in certain areas of the south, but there’s
been much less archaeology done in the area
where I work, the Piedmont.
There’s a lot of historical documentation
but much of it tends to be written from the
perspective of the owners of slaves or the
plantation owners, and very little of it is
from the perspective of the people who were
enslaved.
NARRATOR: But now archaeology is helping to
tell that story.
Every summer since 2007, Heath and her students
have been methodically excavating tracts of
land previously owned by Thomas Jefferson
at the historic Poplar Forest plantation and
at Indian Camp.
PTACEK: Right now I’m looking for artifacts.
We’re screening all of the soil that Hubert
is putting into my screen.
This is quarter inch mesh so any artifacts
that we consider worth saving will be caught
in the screen.
In one unit that we just finished a couple
days ago we have a lot of wrought nails, as
you can see, which is really cool.
And we also have some clinch nails.
And we have two pieces of wine bottle glass
The material culture is helping us—with
artifacts, ceramics, the different pieces
of pottery that we found—is helping us to
really understand these people better.
HEATH: We find a variety of things that would
have been around their house that for whatever
reason they were thrown away; they were broken
or they were lost and so they end up buried
in the ground.
This is a good example of an artifact that
helps us figure out where we are in terms
of time period.
This is an English wine bottle.
It was made sometime between 1750 and 1780.
The manufacturing technique changes a little
bit over time and the overall shape of the
bottle changes over time, so by looking at
clues we can come up with a good date range
for when people would have been using this
bottle and when it was made.
One of the more interesting ones is this little
seal.
It’s made out of brass and it’s holding
a piece of glass that has a carved decoration
on the surface of it.
And this is called a fob seal; when you were
writing a letter or sealing a document you’d
dip it in wax and then put an impression on
it.
This particular seal, the symbolism of it
is associated with British royalty and we’re
not sure why this particular set of symbols
is on this little seal that shows up at a
slave cabin around the time of the American
revolution in Virginia, so we’re doing some
research to try to figure that out.
But this is one of the more unusual things
that we found.
NARRATOR: And aside from the valuable artifacts,
the students are also finding valuable lessons
about what it means to be an archaeologist.
PTACEK: Archaeology is really multidisciplinary;
we draw from a lot of different fields; we
draw from history, anthropology, science;
it’s really nice though to take what you’ve
been working on during school and during work
and applying that to the field.
HEATH: Archaeology tends to be romanticized.
You know, the public sees archaeology through
the media like Indiana Jones—probably most
people have seen.
I think a lot of students don’t realize
the amount of detail and precision that goes
into it.
I don’t think a lot of students realize
how physical it is.
And I think some students think they’d like
to do archaeology but after two or three days
in August with ticks crawling on them they
think, “Well maybe not.”
There’s a side of it that keeps you fit
and keeps you on your feet and then there’s
another side of it that makes you sit back
and think, “Okay, what does all this mean?”
And at the end of the summer, besides having
lost five pounds, what have we learned?
NARRATOR: So far they’ve learned quite a
bit—but, there’s still more work to be
done.
HEATH: Our long term goal is to pull all this
together and be able to tie the community
at Indian Camp and Poplar Forrest together
and perhaps down the road look at some of
the other plantations where other members
of this community had lived and start to create
an understanding of the network of enslaved
people as it developed in central Virginia
from the 1730s up until the turn of the 19th
century.
