Excavations carried out by archaeologists from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and students from the College of William & Mary and the University of California at Berkeley between 1999 and 2002 have carefully unearthed the remains of a small late seventeenth-century farmstead. Named for its probable late seventeenth-century owner and occupant, Thomas Atkinson, the site is located approximately nine miles downriver from the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown near the present-day Carter’s Grove Plantation. In the late seventeenth century, the area encompassing the site was part of Martin’s Hundred Parish, a later phase of the community known as Martin’s Hundred that had been founded in 1619, and immortalized in the 1970s as a result of the excavations and later publications by famed archaeologist Ivor Noël Hume. The Atkinson site represents one of only two known sites dating to this later phase of Martin’s Hundred, when the colonists were expanding their territory further inland and were dispersing themselves farther apart from one another.
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| Aerial view of site, showing the location of various features. |
Over four seasons of fieldwork at the Atkinson site, archaeologists have excavated the remains of at least four structures, two of which were probably used as dwellings. One of the dwellings is thought to have housed the family of Thomas Atkinson, a middling planter, while the other structure may have housed enslaved Africans and African-Americans working on Atkinson’s small plantation. The smaller dwelling is interpreted as a slave quarter based on its fenced separation from the main dwelling, the presence of two subfloor pits (or “root cellars”) near the hearth, and artifacts including colonoware, beads, and domestic tobacco pipes, items commonly associated with slave lifeways.
Throughout most of the seventeenth century, it was typical for all the different people living and working at a particular location to be housed under the same roof, no matter whether they were planter, servant or slave. By the end of the century, however, and coinciding with the dramatic increase in the importation of enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbeans to Virginia, slaves and slave owners were living in separate quarters. If the quarter indeed housed only slaves, the Atkinson site may represent one of the earliest archaeological examples of the use of separate dwellings for slaves and slave owners in a plantation setting.
To investigate the history of this site further, select one of the links below:
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