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Peyton Randolph Site
Digging the Dug: Archaeology at Peyton Randolph
by Andrew C. Edwards
South elevation of Randolph House, c. 1975
In July 1982, Colonial Williamsburg’s newly-formed Office of
Excavation and Conservation started its first undertaking: the
archaeological investigation of the Peyton Randolph back lot.
It was this project that built the foundations upon which the
Department of Architectural and Archaeological Research has based its long-range
research program and where it developed the methods and techniques
needed to carry that program out. It wasn’t the first time archaeology
had visited the Peyton Randolph property, however. That was over
60 years ago.
Just after the foundation acquired the Peyton Randolph House
from the Ball family in 1938, the Architecture Department started
restoration of the house and archaeology of the yard. The purpose
of the excavations was to uncover the outbuilding foundations
directly to the north of the main house and to expose the foundations
of the tenant house or east wing for reconstruction. The “Frenchman’s
Map” and a scar on the east wall of the Peyton Randolph House
both indicated that this tenant house had existed in the eighteenth
century and therefore should be reconstructed. Figure 4 shows
the excavation of the cellar in progress, but is also very revealing
in another, rather disturbing sense: the presence of the dump
truck suggests that the soil from the cellar, along with the early
nineteenth-century artifacts it undoubtedly contained, was used
as landscape fill all over Williamsburg. Latter-day archaeologists
now have to carefully examine every layer they excavate, making
sure it originated on the site currently being examined.
Archaeological work, 1938.
The Frenchman’s map, c. 1781.
Archaeology of the east wing, 1938.
The first archaeology at Peyton Randolph was, as most of Williamsburg’s
in that period, architecturally driven. The Foundation was still
in the process of reconstruction and restoration, so finding building
foundations dating to the eighteenth century was of paramount
importance. Other landscape features such as walkways, fence lines
and gardens were not sought (and frequently not recognized), and
neither were non-architectural artifacts, as evidenced by this
paragraph in Francis Duke’s Peyton Randolph report:
Few fragments, and none of importance, were found among the outbuildings.
The east wing yielded some china fragments in unusually good preservation,
some of them being almost whole pieces (Duke 1939:15).
Only the immediate back yard of the house was initially investigated
by Duke and his team. Their diggings unearthed the kitchen in
its various phases, a smoke house, several different dairies,
a well and a store house. Excavations extended only as far north
as the well. In 1955, the area from the well to Scotland Street
was examined by James Knight and a team of workmen, again from
the Architecture Department. The goals were essentially the same
as they were in the late 1930s excavations: find architectural
ruins for possible reconstruction. Only this time they were more
efficient, because in the late 1930s, Jimmy Knight had invented
cross-trenching.
Cross-trenching in Williamsburg, c. 1940.
The cross-trenching technique was based on the observation that
Williamsburg’s lots are set up in an orderly north-south orientation,
as are the buildings placed on those lots. If one digs parallel
trenches diagonal to the lot lines, a shovel blade wide and about
a shovel handle apart, down to sterile subsoil, then discovering
a brick foundation is quite easy. In fact, it’s hard to miss one.
When the bricks are found, they are fully uncovered. This process,
while making possible the very accurate scale drawings Knight
left us, unfortunately separates the foundation from its related
stratigraphy, making it more difficult to date the building by
its association with certain kinds of artifacts. The cross-exercise
at Peyton Randolph turned up, among other things, three
or four store houses, a granary, and a small dwelling. These were
trenched around to expose the bricks, photographed, drawn to scale
and backfilled.
Structure A.
No further archaeology was attempted until Eric Klingelhofer,
under the direction of Ivor No?l Hume, began exploratory excavations
at the small dwelling at the northwest end of the lot in 1979.
The archaeological crew exposed half the foundations and initiated
stratigraphic excavation of the interior. The project was continued
in July 1982 by Marley R. Brown, director of the archaeology program,
under a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Practically
everything about the new phase of archaeology differed from that
of the 1930s and 1950s, even the fundamental reasons for carrying
out the excavations. The archaeology was not driven by a need
to find architectural structures or artifacts, but a need to understand
the landscape of eighteenth-century Williamsburg and the people
who created it. In the case of the Peyton Randolph back yard,
this meant uncovering and fully excavating not only the outbuilding
interiors, but fence lines, walkways, the areas between the buildings,
and garden features. It also meant, for the newly-emerging Office
of Excavation and Conservation (now the Department of Archaeological
Research), developing new systems of archaeological recovery and
recording that would serve well as a base for future archaeological
research. Effort was expended in answering basic questions such
as: What size unit of excavation should be used in order to capture
fine-grained artifact distributions and yet still be large enough
to be excavated efficiently? What system of measure should be
used, English or metric? What is the best way to keep track of
various soil layers, the stratigraphic relationships of the site?
What do things like seeds, pollen, shell, and bone tell us about
what people ate and what the environment was like in the eighteenth
century? What are the best methods to retrieve them? Additionally,
the early 1980s saw the beginnings of the age of the personal
computer. Information had to be taken in such a way that it could
be entered into a computer database program and manipulated for
analyses. This meant the data had to be consistent and universally
understood. Developing this kind of record keeping system on an
archaeological site was a new experience for almost everyone involved,
and a whole lot of hard work, but the experimentation at Peyton
Randolph was nevertheless fun and exciting.
Work was started on July 7, 1982. The traditional archaeological
technique of digging in 10 by 10-foot squares and maintaining
baulks between them was abandoned in favor of “open area” excavation,
a method that allows the archaeologists to follow old living surfaces
more readily and makes horizontal scale drawings more accurate.
Large sites with complex stratigraphy like Peyton Randolph and
most back lots in Williamsburg are particularly well suited for
this excavation method.
Archaeologists, being clever, named the first structure they
encountered Structure “A.” The second one uncovered was called
Structure “B,” the third Structure “C,” and so on. So the little
16 by 20-foot dwelling at the northeast end of the Randolph lot
became known as Structure “A.” The building was erected on nine
brick piers, probably in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.
It sported a small interior fireplace in its northeast corner.
The interior of the building had been used as a rubbish disposal
receptacle after the house had been torn down. Among the numerous
artifacts recovered from the rubbish were two fragments of an
English-made dinner plate that had a greenish-brown glaze. The
ceramic fragment was identified as Whieldon ware, a type of pottery
first manufactured in 1749. This indicated to the archaeologists
that the dumping of trash in the foundation hole could not have
occurred before that year. Also, none of the very popular “creamware” was
found amongst the debris, so archaeologists could again assume
that the filling was completed by the late 1760s, when this ware
became popular in the colonies.
Determining when the structure was built was another matter. No
such diagnostic artifacts were collected from the layers of soil
associated with the construction of the house. Fortunately for
the archaeologists, but undoubtedly troublesome for the builders,
the site chosen for the structure was over a Middle Plantation-era
(pre-1699) boundary ditch. The three-foot-wide ditch, though filled
by the time the house was built, had not fully compacted. The
southwest corner of the house had to be shored up with brick laid
across the ditch to keep it from slumping in from its own weight.
This was important in revealing the relative date of the construction
of the house, as the boundary ditch was probably filled shortly
after the establishment of the City of Williamsburg on the site
of Middle Plantation in 1699. The house was most likely built
within the first or second decade thereafter, before the ground
had time to fully stabilize.
Reinforced foundations of Structure A.
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