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African-American Archaeology
- Atkinson Site (Site CG-10)
- 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.
- Palace Lands Quarter
- In summer 1998, Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists searched for the remains
of a rural "quarter" that housed field workers, most likely African-American
slaves, on lands owned by Governor Fauquier in the third quarter of the eighteenth
century. The site, which would have been just outside the town in Fauquier’s
day, is located in the woods near what is now the Williamsburg Woodlands. Briefly
tested in 1997, the site yielded the fragments of a brick hearth. Further excavation
was undertaken to expose more of the building and to determine its size, function,
and date. Discoveries include a large rectangular pit (possibly a "root cellar"),
and a long ditch paralleled by a row of postholes. The series of postholes
may be evidence of a second small building separated from the hearth by the
ditch. Artifacts recovered securely date these features to the years between
1740 and 1780.
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