The Archaeological Artifact Collection
The artifacts recovered from Williamsburg sites are unsurpassed
among eighteenth-century American archaeological collections. Many
are the same objects used by Ivor and Audrey Noël Hume to educate two generations
of American historical archaeologists and museum curators.
A large number come from abandoned well shafts and other sealed
deposits, and are distinguished by their quantity, diversity,
and relatively good state of preservation.
The collection also contains other one-of-a-kind artifact assemblages from
stratified and tightly dated contexts, including tools, products, and manufacturing
refuse from two large blacksmith shops, an extraordinary collection of working-class
leather footwear, the country’s best collection of faunal remains from eighteenth-century
urban deposits, and the largest collection of glass and ceramic objects from
domestic sites whose occupants’ social and economic status can be accurately
identified. Such collections of well-documented commonplace artifacts have
scholarly value for historians and archaeologists far beyond their occasional
use as showpieces suitable for museum exhibition or type specimens for teaching
artifact identification.
Colonial Williamsburg has become a center for the study of early American
material history, no doubt in part because the organization has always had
its own museum-related reasons for taking artifacts seriously. In recent years
our own scholars have played leading roles in rethinking questions about urban
growth in early American towns and cities and in defining the issues raised
by the so-called consumer revolution. Scholar-craftsmen working in the Historic
Area of Williamsburg make extensive use of the archaeological collections
to research a wide variety of eighteenth-century objects, such as architectural
hardware, tools, harness and carriage hardware, domestic objects, pottery
and glass, leather shoes, and trade-related items to rediscover methods of
manufacturing, changes in style, form, and function. The results of this research
make reconstructed Williamsburg as historically accurate as possible.
Cataloguing Work
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