The Current Project

The Ravenscroft Archaeological Project is a multi-year excavation now entering its third field season. The project was founded, in large measure, on two earlier excavations (in 1954 and 1998) that established the site’s basic layout, and piqued historians’ interest in what was clearly a long- and heavily-occupied property. Although two excavations have taken place on these lots before, many questions remain about the site’s residents, history, and architecture. It is these questions that are driving our current research and excavation.

What Do We Want to Know?

The Ravenscroft property is quite large and there is much to explore. Since 2006 the project has focused on just a small portion of the site: a 14-by-16-foot cellar first found in 1954 and partially reopened in 1998. Archaeologists have opened a 9-by-15-meter “excavation area” around this cellar in an effort to answer the following questions:

• When was the cellar built?
• What did the building look like?
• How was it used? As a house or for some other purpose?
• Who lived or worked in these spaces?

Current excavation area in relation to earlier project areas.
(Click on image to enlarge)

Excavation Progress

2006: Archaeologists and field school students spent the summer of 2006 stripping “plowzone” (a thick layer of soil churned by years of plowing) from the excavation area, and re-exposing the east cellar wall, which had been shored up with sand following its discovery in 1998. By the end of the 2006 field season, a small section of the cellar’s east wall was visible, and while plowzone still covered portions of the site, dark cellar fill was emerging in other areas.

Students excavate plowzone from the site in 2006. (Click on image to enlarge)

End of the 2006 field season. The cellar wall begins to emerge. (Click on image to enlarge)

2007: The project resumed in May 2007 with archaeologists eager to explore the cellar and its contents. Though previous excavators had removed the cellar fill in 1954, recovery of artifacts had not been a priority for them. The Ravenscroft cellar contained a rich variety of household materials, from plates and wine bottles, to the bones from past meals, tobacco pipes, window glass, toy marbles, and gun flints. By summer’s end, archaeologists working inside the cellar had reached a thin layer of coal, marking the bottom of the fill examined by our predecessors.

Outside the cellar, archaeologists explored and recorded the exterior hearth, the bulkhead (or outside cellar) steps, and searched for additional evidence that this cellar was once part of a larger structure.

Students record the bulkhead steps in 2007. (Click on image to enlarge)

Wine bottle seal recovered from the Ravenscroft cellar. (Click on image to enlarge)

Students and archaeologists stand inside the excavated Ravenscroft cellar.

What Have We Learned?

The Ravenscroft project was designed to answer specific questions about this small building, its appearance, function, and inhabitants. With two seasons of excavation now completed, and a third season at hand, here is what archaeologists have learned:

When was this cellar built?

Archaeologists remove the Ravenscroft cellar fill in quadrants. (Click on image to enlarge)

In 1998, when archaeologists dug a portion of the Ravenscroft site threatened by construction of the tenant house exhibit, they encountered a large trash pit, or midden, extending along the east wall of the 14-by-16-foot cellar. The midden contained more than 9,000 artifacts, a significant number of which dated to the seventeenth century. The trash pit contents led archaeologists to consider the possibility that this cellar dated to the 1600s, rather than the 1700s. Although the cellar was roughly parallel and perpendicular to the street (characteristic of buildings constructed after the town was laid out in 1699), it was, arguably, sufficiently “off-grid” to have been coincidentally placed, with the intended orientation being along a ravine to the west.

Within the first months of the 2006 field season, archaeologists knew that this cellar could not have been constructed in the seventeenth century. We know now that it was built sometime after 1720, based on the recovery of a piece of ceramic called “Rogers ware” from the cellar’s “builder’s trench” (the backfilled hole in which the cellar was built). William Rogers began producing this type of pottery in nearby Yorktown in 1720. For a fragment of Rogers ware to wind up in an open builder’s trench, the cellar would have to have been dug sometime after 1720. How long after 1720 is still uncertain.

Archaeologists have not excavated the entire builder’s trench, and it is possible that the date for the cellar’s construction may change again. If archaeologists should find artifacts dating after 1720 during the upcoming season, we will have to change our interpretation of when this cellar was built.

What did the building look like when it was standing?

We suspect that the building that stood on this cellar was a frame (wooden) building standing 1 to 1½ stories high. The shallow cellar is “English basement,” half of which would have been below ground, the other half above. In all, the cellar would have been about 6 feet deep, requiring a set of steps to access the front door from the outside.

What appears to be a small corner “fireplace” in the image above is really an arch that supported a fireplace on the first floor. Archaeologists are still puzzled by the outward-facing hearth. Its presence suggests that there was an uncellared addition to this building that extended north. Neither the 2006 nor the 2007 excavation were successful in finding postholes, a builder’s trench, or any other indication of that addition. It is possible that years of plowing have destroyed what evidence existed. Alternatively, our building may always have been the small square that you see today. The Revolutionary War period Frenchman’s Map (seen below) shows it as such by 1782.

How was the building used?

The Isham Goddin Store in Williamsburg is similar in size and layout to the Ravenscroft cellar. (Click on image to enlarge)

The cellar’s wide bulkhead entrance centered on the front of the building suggests that it may have been a store, looking something like the Isham Goddin Shop at the east end of town.

Alternatively, its small size and proximity to the main house raise the possibility that it functioned as an outbuilding. The conjectural image below suggests a possible arrangement between this building and the larger “main house” to the east.

Perhaps the most intriguing theory currently in circulation has as its basis an 1820s reference to this property as “the old bakehouse lot.” Commercial bread production might explain the need for a cellar with wide steps to accommodate crates and barrels. Bread baking might also shed light on the very large hearth constructed on what seems to be the outside of the building.

Conjectural image showing the Ravenscroft cellar (Structure A) in relation to the larger cellar found in 1954. Outlines in red are buildings in existence by 1782 (based on their presence on the Frenchman’s Map), outlines in green are presumably later additions. Drawing by Kathryn Sikes. (Click on image to enlarge)

It may be some time before archaeologists can say how this structure was used. In addition to the cellar’s physical characteristics, archaeologists will need to examine artifacts found around it for clues relating to the activities taking place here.* Additionally, we will look for “archaeobotanical” evidence—things like grains—trapped within building repairs, to confirm our bakehouse theory.

Who lived and/or worked there?

Regardless of how the Ravenscroft cellar was used, it is likely to have been familiar to the enslaved members of successive households living on these lots. A store, a kitchen, or a bakehouse all would have required slave labor. Additionally, slaves were often housed in outbuildings.

Continuing documentary research has resulted in a growing list of enslaved people whose names were associated with owners and tenants of this property. The Ravenscroft project offers an opportunity to examine tangible evidence of those whose lives have been poorly represented in Williamsburg’s written history.

Enslaved people living on the Ravenscroft property during the mid-eighteenth century. This is not a comprehensive list; work continues in the documentary record. (Note: the “Jenny” discussed in the last column is a slave mentioned in a 1775 Virginia Gazette runaway notice.)

What’s Next?

The 2008 summer season will continue to focus on outstanding questions about the cellar’s date, how it was used, and whether or not the building included an addition. The answers to some of these questions will come from the lab where thousands of Ravenscroft artifacts are currently being analyzed. Other questions will require additional digging. During the early part of summer 2008, students will open new units to the north, expanding our area of investigation. Additionally, students and archaeologists will excavate a line of postholes, presumed to be a fenceline, running along the cellar’s west wall.

Finally, archaeologists look forward to exploring the site’s southwest corner where eighteenth-century soil layers and features seem to have escaped two-and-a-half centuries of plowing. For updates on our progress, please visit the Ravenscroft blog!

* Because artifacts in the cellar were disturbed during the 1954 excavation, they are not useful for interpretive purposes.