Most archaeologists today are no strangers to the complexities of legacy collections. These materials present challenges in the form of field and curatorial methodologies, but they can also offer valuable insight into crucial archaeological sites and assemblages. We say “can” because we must first unravel these complexities to interpret the resulting data. Monticello, a historic site dedicated to interpreting the structures and landscape of Thomas Jefferson’s Charlottesville plantations, certainly has its fair share of legacy collections from the mountaintop, and part of our current goals are to curate these materials alongside ongoing projects across the plantation. This discussion focuses on two such legacy collections, recovered from Oriol Pi-Sunyer’s 1957 excavation of Mulberry Row and Vladimir Markotic’s 1958 excavation of the Garden Wall—both areas located on the Monticello mountaintop. Both archaeologists were Harvard doctoral students in anthropology hired by the curator of Monticello, James A. Bear. We will summarize these excavations, the curatorial choices over the following decades, and the challenges of archiving and interpreting old assemblages. Although early stages, we have already “re”-discovered important material and contextual information.
This project offers a case study of the value in revisiting legacy collections and how they broaden our archaeological, interpretive, and educational missions. Our goals of course begin with the need to properly curate and preserve all archaeological and archival materials. We then aim to create a permanent Educational Collection to be used for our outreach and public engagement, including artifact identification training for students and scholars, travelling study collections for our DAACS partners, material culture assessments, and assemblages intended for family-friendly programs—as we all know, there is nothing like being able to hold an artifact in your hand instead of looking at it through a glass. Additionally – and as we’ll discuss some in this paper – these assemblages directly relate to areas of past and current archaeological studies, and therefore the results of this work will significantly enhance our research aims.
In June and July of 1957, Pi-Sunyer undertook excavations to investigate the historic structures along Mulberry Row dating to circa 1770-1830 and thus coinciding with Jefferson’s ownership of the property (Pi-Sunyer and Bear 1957). This historic road served as the first roundabout of Jefferson’s road system that circled down the Monticello mountaintop.
Located on the southern slope from the main house, Mulberry Row consisted of a series of dwellings and working structures for enslaved and white workers. Using Jefferson’s Mutual Assurance Plat of 1796 as a guide, Pi-Sunyer opened a series of trenches along a roughly 340-foot area on the south side of Mulberry Row, which spanned several structures he names using Roman Numerals.
Today, we identify these structures using the names and descriptions noted on that 1796 plat. Those building notations and descriptions are shown in Figure 2. From west to east, Pi-Sunyer excavated Building C (the Joiner’s Shop), Building D (the Blacksmith’s shop), Building j (the Nailery), Building l (the storehouse for iron), and Building n (the wash house), which was replaced by a stone house in 1809. Additionally, Pi-Sunyer’s trenches cut through Building m, the smoke house and dairy, although he does not identify this as a structure. There is no evidence that Pi-Sunyer excavated stratigraphically or to subsoil, but rather that he went only to the depth necessary to expose structural features. Although a couple of photos show the use of screens, it is not clear whether he implemented this collection in a systematic way throughout the project.
You may notice that Structure IV is not listed on this map – it was located further east from Mulberry Row and investigated by Pi-Sunyer as a potential Jefferson-period structure. After discovering it post-dated Jefferson, they ceased excavation.
The artifacts recovered by Pi-Sunyer were examined by James A. Bear, the aforementioned Curator of Monticello at the time. In his adjoining report, Bear provides preliminary interpretations for what the artifact deposits may represent, hypothesizing that they result from daily discard but not going into further analysis (Pi-Sunyer and Bear 1957; Figure 3). Additionally, Bear provides drawings and brief explanations of many artifacts, creating a preliminary type collection (Figure 3a-b). Of particular note are the detailed watercolors by his wife, Mary Bear (Figure 3c). You will see how useful these drawings are to us when we discuss our reassessment project.
From June 10 to August 15 of the following year, Markotic began an investigation of the garden wall (Markotic 1957). Downslope from Mulberry Row, the vegetable garden was likely first planted in 1770 and later terraced around 1800.
The resulting garden wall separated the “garden terras” from the orchard area. Markotic aimed to better understand the timeline for the garden wall construction, the methods by which it was built, and the full span of this feature. Like Pi-Sunyer, Markotic placed a series of trenches, in this case cutting into the garden wall at various intervals (Figure 5). He most intensively excavated what he calls the “Central Part,” and he also uncovered the remains of the now-reconstructed Garden Pavilion.
East and west of this area, Markotic placed seventeen smaller trenches—or sections—observing stratigraphic variation in most of these and noting simple changes in color and texture in the sediment (Figure 6).
In his report, Markotic concludes that the garden wall likely spanned over 1,000 ft. in length and was constructed using a “dry stone” technique, in which no binding like mortar was used. He hypothesizes an initial and smaller part of the wall was built around 1774, and another building episode occurred around 1808. There is no detailed analysis given to the artifact assemblage in Markotic’s report, except for a brief summary listing broad artifact types by section (Markotic 1957).
These summaries of the 1950s excavations (and the accompanying maps) outline what we understand to date for each project. From the outset, the primary goal of the Pi-Sunyer and Markotic excavations was to locate and identify Jefferson-period structures on the south side of the mountaintop. Because neither archaeologist consistently employed stratigraphic methods of excavation, the artifacts could not be used to date occupation or construction periods and seem to have played a lesser role in interpretation. Once the final site reports were written, the artifacts were boxed and archived.
Flash forward to 2011 when Charlotte Devine, a high school intern in the Monticello Archaeology Department, was tasked with returning to these projects and inventorying the archived assemblages (Figure 7). Before going through the boxes, she read through the Pi-Sunyer and Markotic site reports and discovered that part of the Pi-Sunyer report and site map were incomplete. This led her to Special Collections at the Jefferson library, where she found a complete site map. Additionally, she took the initiative to contact Pi-Sunyer himself—you can see his response letter to her on the screen—this correspondence resulted in the acquisition of valuable photographs and information. Pi-Sunyer has since passed away, making these efforts all the more valuable.
Charlotte’s inventory provided us with a general overview of how artifacts from both assemblages were archived, namely bagged by artifact type—a common curatorial choice in past decades—but one leading to contextual ambiguity. As Charlotte went through the bags of artifacts, she discovered documentation and pull slips indicating that someone in the early 1980s re-examined the assemblages, likely re-bagging and re-boxing them. The dates on these pull slips coincide with the creation of Monticello’s archaeology department and Dr. William Kelso’s excavations of sites on the mountaintop (see also Kelso 1997 and Scholnick et al., for example). Kelso or his staff most likely pulled artifacts from the two assemblages to create a comparative study collection and create typologies to help with identification of artifacts from their projects.
Fortunately, Kelso’s team kept original bag tags and added pull slips to many of these artifact bags, thus retaining some important contextual identifiers. However, many bags and tags were simply labeled “miscellaneous” artifact types—and these cases prove the most difficult today (Figure 8).
One other curatorial challenge we encountered during the inventory process concerned the artifact labels (Figure 9). Numerous artifacts were labeled with either masking tape (Figure 9a) or a red wax pencil (Figure 9b-c), which rubs away easily. Over time, some labels had partially worn off or were no longer legible. It also was not immediately clear which project or context the labels referenced—remember, we did not have a complete Pi-Sunyer report at this time. Additionally, artifacts have been mis-cataloged over the years; there are cases of Markotic artifacts being cataloged as from the Pi-Sunyer project, and there are also cases of Pi-Sunyer artifacts being cataloged into Kelso projects that investigated the same areas along Mulberry Row.
In short, the inventory efforts of our lab intern in 2011 provided us with a complete Pi-Sunyer site map and exposed multiple curatorial and cataloging discrepancies as well as important missing documentation. It was the first step in learning “what we didn’t know,” enabling us to better proceed almost a decade later when the lab team had the resources to renew their efforts in puzzling out these assemblages.
We returned to reassessing the Pi-Sunyer and Markotic assemblages in 2020. Our initial goal was to separate artifacts into their appropriate project and re-archive them. In order to do this, we first needed to determine if the labels from bag tags and artifacts related to a particular context or area in either excavation. Since neither archaeologist left behind context records or a field journal, we had to rely on the site reports. Locating a complete Pi-Sunyer report was the first obstacle we needed to overcome.
Since much of the Foundation’s institutional history is stored in Special Collections at our library, we returned there and discovered not one but three different copies of the site report as well as original correspondence, photos, and folios of original artifact drawings by Mary Bear. We compared the library copies with those in the department and were able to compile a complete report (Pi-Sunyer and Bear 1957).
Having a complete site and excavation map allowed us to identify the trenches Pi-Sunyer dug along Mulberry Row, the structures and features he exposed, and most importantly, the terms he used to identify excavation trenches and structures. We could now correlate some of the artifact labels and tags with the spatial and structural references on the site map (Figure 10). Some of these notations referred to specific trenches on the map while others included the structure (written as a Roman numeral). Some labels included both a structure and trench designation. In all but a few cases, the structure number and trenches lined up with what was drawn on the map.
Some of the original bag tags also contained information tying certain artifacts to drawings in the artifact section of Pi-Sunyer site report (Figure 3). For example, some tags listed the acronym “M.R.” and an Arabic number. These IDs referenced the artifact drawings in the report. Each drawing was assigned a number, followed by a description and its structural or trench associations. We have been able to locate and identify many of these artifacts based on these drawings and M.R. IDs. A significant number are currently in our study collection.
Although we felt confident that we could identify some of the Pi-Sunyer artifacts in the mixed boxes, we were still left with a large number of artifacts with labels or tags that could not be definitively assigned to either the Pi-Sunyer or Markotic excavations. We knew that both archaeologists used Roman numerals to designate areas or features in their excavations: Structures I – V for Pi-Sunyer and Sections I – X for Markotic. The numbers assigned to many of the artifacts, however, extended well beyond those referred to in the site reports. We have artifacts and tags with labels going all the way up to Roman Numeral 84. The site reports and maps did not include any clues as to these higher Roman numerals. Our ability to reconcile the artifacts with their appropriate project seemed unlikely unless we could determine the meaning of the ambiguous labels and tags.
A completely random event in 2022 helped us crack the labeling code. That fall, a member of our security team delivered an old banker’s box to the archaeology department. Unbeknownst to us, the box had been stored in the attic of the Monticello gatehouse for an unknown period of time. Fortunately, someone had scribbled “Archaeology” on the front of the box, which led to its return to our lab.
At the bottom of the box were two extremely degraded legal-size writing pads entitled “1958 Archaeology Finds List” (Figure 11). The written information consisted of 84 entries marked by a Roman numeral, spatial descriptions, and a date. Under each Roman numeral was a series of Arabic numbers indicating a particular artifact or group of artifacts. These notebooks proved to be the “Rosetta Stone” to decode the remaining labels in the mixed artifact assemblages. The combination of Roman numerals and Arabic numbers matched many of the original bag tags.
As previously described, Markotic excavated a central trench, “sections” east and west of the central axis dividing the excavation, and then several unnumbered trenches on the west end of Mulberry Row. The Finds List, and the spatial information it contained, made it clear that Markotic sometimes split these trenches by stratigraphic layers and/or smaller areas (Figure 12). The 84 Roman numerals refer to these discrete contexts, as well as two groupings of charcoal and wood that were lumped together from different contexts.
Once we understood the labels, lab staff and a dedicated and enthusiastic corp of volunteers began separating artifacts into their specific project with the understanding that some artifacts did not have enough information to be associated with either excavation (Figure 13). After re-bagging and re-boxing the artifacts into their proper projects, we will attach permanent labels. Our approach to labeling is to standardize contextual notations without losing information from the original labels. As for the artifacts with ambiguous notations, we will make sure they retain their original IDs in the event another “Rosetta Stone” is discovered.
As previously mentioned, there is a large diversity in artifact type, form, decoration, and material. Of particular note are the wide variety of architectural, ceramic, and glass artifacts from both of these assemblages. These artifacts have great research potential and will expand our understanding of all people living and laboring at Monticello – the enslaved community, free white craftsmen and overseers, and the Jefferson family.
We have been relatively successful in puzzling out the context for many of the artifacts in our reassessment. For example, a pair of scissors labeled with the Roman Numeral III, were identified as one of the artifacts drawn by James Bear and thus confidently associated with Pi-Sunyer’s Structure III, or Building l the storehouse for iron (Figures 14). The trenches around this structure also went through Building m, the smoke house and dairy. Although the contextual integrity of these scissors is not quite at today’s standards, it still provides a valuable opportunity to expand our understanding of the materials used in these areas. And objects like these scissors can be very powerful in tying artifacts to space for a public audience.
Our preliminary artifact research has also resulted in the collaboration with our other Monticello colleagues. For example, three brass shutter pulls and hardware from these excavations are nearly identical to shutter pulls and mounts in the Monticello mansion—as identified by our Curatorial colleagues (Figure 15). Further consultation with our Restoration department revealed similar hardware in their collection as well. Again, these are valuable ways these materials can serve as teaching tools and interdepartmental outreach.
Additionally, we have identified objects that we believe may have been found during restoration work within the house during the early 1950s. Several objects have labels indicating they were found in certain parts of the mansion, along with dates prior to the Mulberry Row and Garden Wall excavations. Since James Bear served as the first full-time curator for the Foundation beginning in 1955, it seems likely he archived all “recovered” objects from Monticello together. We are currently working with our colleagues in Curatorial and Restoration to further identify these objects and their provenance and discuss protocols for repatriating them to their proper department.
Cracking the labeling code for the two projects allows us to use the artifacts for multiple purposes. Given the diversity, quantity, and condition of the artifacts, we aim to create an educational study collection that will be used for training workshops in material culture, public programs, and possibly exhibits. Any future goals for fully cataloging these projects into the DAACS database will need to be reassessed once we have fully gone through the materials.
Throughout the year, we participate in on-site and community events to spread the word about our work and to give folks first-hand experience into archaeological practices. We also share digital resources for anyone to continue their education at home!
The summer Monticello-UVA Field School offers a hands-on introduction to basic excavation, recording, and laboratory techniques in archaeology.
Learn how archaeologists are using Internet technologies to foster comparative research and scholarly collaboration.
We undertook the reanalysis of the Pi-Sunyer and Markotic legacy collections knowing it would significantly add to our workload. Some may ask why we chose to prioritize such a project, especially one with so many curatorial and methodological challenges. There are several reasons why we think this undertaking is important. As professional archaeologists, we have a responsibility to be stewards of all collections regardless of how or when they were excavated. In additional to this fundamental need, we argue there is a powerful call-to-action for utilizing and analyzing the extensive and rich legacy collections at Monticello as much as we can. Despite methodological and record-keeping challenges, these projects have significant interpretive value for both the role of archaeology at Monticello as well as the historical narratives that we are constantly expanding, challenging, and sharing. Finally, one of our highest priorities in Monticello Archaeology is public and scholarly engagement and collaboration. Through DAACS, our field school, internship programs, and scholarship, we consistently engage in material culture identification and analysis training. Educational collections are vital to these efforts. Additionally, we participate in as many public and family programs throughout the year as we can—both Monticello and through other community institutions. Having diverse, less fragmented, and engaging artifacts that visitors—especially kids—can touch is crucial for engagement. The Pi-Sunyer and Markotic assemblages are excellent candidates for filling these roles, and we are excited to finally be able to use them as such.
As with all legacy projects, there are so many people who need to be acknowledged for the work they’ve done over the past decades, first and foremost Oriol Pi-Sunyer, Vladimir Markotic, James A. Bear, and Mary Bear. For her valuable efforts in tracking down necessary documentation, we thank Charlotte Devine, as well as assistance in the library from Anna Berkes. In particular, we want to acknowledge the work by Archaeology volunteer, Ron Downes, who was instrumental in solving the documentary puzzle in past years and who continues to help us re-curate these assemblages in the lab. We thank our colleagues in Restoration and Curatorial for their expertise in artifact identification, including Lucy Midelfort, Jolen Bain, Carol Richardson, and Malia Sbach. Finally, we have endless appreciation and thanks for all of our amazing Archaeology Lab volunteers and intern who are instrumental to us being able to process, label, and store these extensive legacy collections.
Handpainted Chinese-export porcelains
Iron equestrian equipment
Clear glass bottle finishes
Lead-glazed redware vessels
Undecorated British creamware
Handpainted British pearlware
Iron architectural hardware
Shell-edged British earthenware
Clear glass stemwares
Transferprinted British earthenwares
Glass bottle bases
Utilitarian stoneware vessels
Kelso, William M. 1997. Archaeology at Monticello: Artifacts of Everyday Life in the Plantation Community. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.
Markotic, Vladimir. 1958. "Archeological Investigation of Monticello". Report in Monticello Department of Archaeology.
Pi-Sunyer, Oriol, and James A. Bear. 1957. "Archeological Explorations at Monticello Along Mulberry Row". E332.74. P51. 1957. C2. Report in Monticello Department of Archaeology.
Scholnick, Jonathan, Derek Wheeler, and Fraser Neiman. 2001. “Mulberry Row Reassessment: The Building l Site.” Monticello Department of Archaeology Technical Report Series, No. 3.
