CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. -- The Monticello-based Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery has been awarded a $132,832 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of a project it is conducting in collaboration with two institutions in England.

The grant to DAACS was one of five Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants awarded by NEH's newly established Office of Digital Humanities in conjunction with the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee.

DAACS staff members are working with colleagues from England's Southampton University and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool to develop and make available on the Internet an integrated digital archive of archaeological and historical data from 18th-century sugar plantations on the eastern Caribbean islands of St. Kitts and Nevis.

This project fits within a larger DAACS initiative that is examining slave lifeways on small islands in the Caribbean and the larger island of Jamaica, said Jillian Galle, the DAACS project manager.

Ongoing DAACS work in Jamaica is a collaboration with scholars from the University of West Indies campus at Mona, Jamaica, and the University of Virginia. This summer, DAACS researchers will join students and staff from Southampton and Liverpool and UWI-Mona students to conduct intensive archaeological testing of two slave-village sites on St. Kitts and Nevis. The participation of the UWI students has been made possible by a $20,000 grant from the Reed Foundation in New York.

The data collected by these projects will add to the growing body of information available on the Web about the slavery-based societies of the North America and the Caribbean. The DAACS site -- www.daacs.org -- currently contains standardized, downloadable archaeological data from 32 slave quarter sites (including Monticello). DAACS research is designed to advance the understanding of slavery and the critical role it played in the development of Britain's American colonies.

The classification and measurement protocols and database structure developed by DAACS make possible the seamless analysis of data from multiple sites, and they are being adopted by other institutions.

For example, the archaeology department at The Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson outside Nashville, Tenn., received a $285,855 NEH grant to catalog and analyze about 800,000 artifacts from the enslaved community using the DAACs systems. In July, Hermitage researchers will travel to Monticello for three weeks of training before beginning their analysis of these artifacts.