Archaeology is critical to the study of African Americans in colonial-period Virginia. Colonial Williamsburg, the restored eighteenth-century capital of the Virginia colony, has been engaged in studying and presenting African-American history since the 1970s. The Carter’s Grove slave quarter site was excavated in the early 1970s when African-American archaeology was a fairly new area of study. The site is among the earliest excavated quarters, and it continues to be among the most significant excavations in the field.
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The slave quarter at Carter’s Grove was reconstructed on a careful study of archaeological evidence, including a series of root cellars found by archaeologist William Kelso in the early 1970s. Such authentic restorations permit a tremendous range of accurate interpretive programs. |
As the discipline of African-American archaeology has developed and massively expanded with the work of Theresa Singleton, Leland Ferguson, Douglas Armstrong and many others, archaeologists have applied different theories and methodologies.
Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists have participated in a series of large-scale programs of investigation, including the Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery (DAACS), a major synthetic effort organized by archaeologists from Monticello (with funding from the Mellon Foundation) and also involving institutions such as Poplar Forest, Mount Vernon, and the College of William & Mary.
Recently, work by Colonial Williamsburg at the eighteenth-century Rich Neck slave quarter, located about a mile west of Williamsburg’s core area, focused on subfloor pits (commonly known as root cellars) and their contents, particularly faunal and botanical remains, which were used to answer questions about how enslaved people had utilized their environment. The faunal and botanical remains recovered from this site represent perhaps one of the most complete assemblages in the Chesapeake.
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| Staff Archaeologist Ywone Edwards-Ingram shows some of the results of excavation at the Rich Neck Slave Quarter site. Public involvement is integral to Colonial Williamsburg’s archaeological studies of the African-American past. |
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While sites with geographically discrete African-American remains excavated by the Foundation are few (Carter’s Grove, Rich Neck, and Palace Lands are the chief examples), most sites in the Historic Area of Colonial Williamsburg are archaeologically complex areas.
Both blacks and whites lived and/or worked at these places throughout Williamsburg’s colonial history. Several different households or businesses have occupied these spaces. These sites challenge the archaeologists as they honed their skills in presenting a comprehensive archaeology of America. In the late 1980s investigations of the nineteenth-century Polly Valentine site on the Brush-Everard property in the Historic Area provided an opportunity to investigate an urban site with questions about slave housing, material life, and social interactions.
Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists assess present resources and supplement them with newly discovered ones in the effort to make archaeology more relevant to African-American interpretation. They work with the museum’s interpretive sites and programs to develop furnishing and other interpretive plans, and in the reconstruction of buildings of which the most notable example is the Carter’s Grove slave quarter.
Training and public education programs are incorporated to promote African-American archaeology as a viable research endeavor. The archaeological research is helping to create a better understanding of the life and cultures of African Americans.
To learn more about a couple of major topics in African-American archaeology, follow the links below:
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