Monticello Archaeology Blog

December 29, 2025

Recent excavations at Monticello offer new insights into a unique feature of late 18th-century American architecture: Jefferson’s indoor privies, which he called  "air closets", and a tunnel linked to them. While his Virginia contemporaries used traditional outdoor privies, Jefferson sought to approximate elite European standards of indoor sanitation through a system based on ventilation through 150-foot stone tunnel buried below the East Lawn. We have been able to combine evidence from the archaeological and documentary records to clarify how the system worked and to advance our understanding of Jefferson's goals in designing it and investing the labor of enslaved workers to build and maintain it. The evidence indicates it was an innovation motivated by his diplomatic tenure in Paris. Read more about our current understanding of Jefferson's air closets, privy tunnel, and their historical significance.

October 31, 2025

Recent archaeological excavations at Monticello have exposed a 10-foot section of the privy tunnel, installed for the second phase of the Monticello house (Monticello II) in order to mitigate the smell of newly built indoor privies. This project has provided an opportunity for us to collaborate with our Geology and Restoration colleagues to better understand the craftsmanship and materials that went into the privy vent construction. Read more about this feature and our ongoing work here!

October 25, 2025

Paper presented at the Archeological Society of Virginia Conference in Staunton, VA, October 24 - 26

By Mary Armstrong, Elliot Alvey, and Josephine Schreiber

Beginning in January 2025, Monticello archaeologists began mitigation efforts for a new pathway on Monticello’s East Lawn. The East Lawn has been subject to archaeological investigations as part of the 2010 Kitchen Road project and during Phase I survey in 2018/2019. Findings from these past excavations and documentary indicate that the mountaintop was leveled and subsequently terraformed, both during the initial construction of the mansion in 1768 and again when it was remodeled beginning in the 1790s. This project has given us an opportunity to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the construction of the mountaintop landscape and how it changed over time. Using information from one test square, this paper aims to discuss preliminary findings regarding the creation of the East Lawn landscape and when/how it has changed, using both stratigraphic and artifact analysis.

April 11, 2025

In collaboration with geoarchaeologist Howard Cyr, archaeologists at Monticello continue to analyze the micromorphology - or the microscopic analysis of blocks of sediment - at Home Farm Quarter Site 30. This late-18th-century archaeological site was likely once home to enslaved agricultural laborers. Monticello archaeologists carried out an initial round of excavations at this site from 2022-2024, during which time they uncovered a subfloor pit, used for storage of foodstuffs and other goods. Samples were taken from this feature and sent for specialized analysis. Check out the latest of these results here!

April 3, 2025

Check out some cool artifact research coming out of our latest excavations on the mountaintop! Analyst Miranda Leclerc dives into an investigation of an interesting decorative technique found on a British creamware sherd from a likely teaware vessel. Using the Monticello Archaeology study collection, she discusses this vessel in comparison with other excavated sites on the mountaintop. Take a look!

April 1, 2025

Paper presented at the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference in Gettysburg, PA March 20-23

By Dr. Christine S. Devine

Updating artifact data to reflect new research and terminology is often a necessary step before archaeologists can accurately compare artifact data from different sites.  This paper discusses how recent efforts to interpret the coarse earthenware assemblage at Site 30, an enslaved quarter site at Monticello, highlighted the need to reanalyze the coarse earthenware assemblage from Building o, an enslaved quarter site excavated during the early 1980s. It shows how reanalyzing legacy data using updated type descriptions and standardized terminology developed by the DAACS project allows for a more fine-grained and accurate comparative analysis of coarse earthenware assemblages at different sites. It also shows how incorporating new information on coarse earthenware types into existing records is the first step to better understanding variation in coarse earthenware use and acquisition across the plantation landscape.

Last edited March 26, 2025

Download our Education Resource Packet and check out archaeology activities and lessons for the classroom or at home! 

December 2, 2024

The DAACS team is in the final stages of cataloging over 50,000 artifacts and accompanying fields records from three urban house lots in historic St. Augustine – Fatio, de la Cruz, and de Leon -- as part of the Digitizing St. Augustine Project, a collaboration with colleagues at the Florida Museum of Natural History, funded by NEH. In their most recent work, they discovered a remarkable artifact: a pipe bowl carved from the broken rim of an Iberian storage jar!

December 2, 2024

In November, we began collaborating with micromorphology consultant Howard Cyr to analyze the subfloor pit at Home Farm Quarter Site 30, a late-eighteenth-century domestic site once home to enslaved agricultural laborers. Micromorphology is the study of the shape, orientation, and composition of individual grains that comprise layers of soil or sediment. From Howard's analysis, we hope to examine how the layers of fill within the subfloor pit were deposited. We add to this data results of a pollen study by consultant John Jones in order to better understand the lives of Site 30's inhabitants as well as tobacco cultivation at Monticello in the late eighteenth century.

November 20, 2024

Paper presented at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Williamsburg, VA, November 14-16

By Chris Devine

A growing body of scholarship on locally made coarse earthenwares in Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic has provided archaeologists with important comparative data and insights into the regional production, marketing, and use of coarse earthenwares. Recent excavations at Site 30, a late 18th-century quarter site for enslaved agricultural workers at Monticello, have uncovered various types of American coarse earthenware, including a distinctive lead-glazed variety currently unaffiliated with any regional workshop. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of this coarse earthenware type by comparing its visual characteristics to those from previous studies of coarse earthenwares at Monticello and other sites. It also will explore several possible explanations for why it is found across the plantation landscape on sites with different dates of occupation.

November 20, 2024

Paper presented at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Williamsburg, VA, November 14-16

By Crystal O'Connor and Fraser D. Neiman

Like many archaeological sites once occupied by free and enslaved members of the slave society that expanded into the Virginia Piedmont in the eighteenth century, Site 7 at Monticello presents a difficult analytical challenge. How can we infer the locations of houses, their occupation dates, and who might have lived in them from an archaeological record that largely consists of artifacts scattered across sites hundreds of feet in diameter and excavated from unstratified plowzone contexts?  This paper describes two of the methods we have developed to provide an answer. The first uses generalized additive models to make statistically reliable maps of the spatial distribution of single chronologically sensitive artifact types. The second relies on a multivariate statistical method (correspondence analysis) to identify the underlying chronological gradient that is responsible for spatial variation in the proportions of multiple artifact types recovered from plowzone excavation units.  Using these methods, we have discovered that Site 7 was initially occupied by an overseer and enslaved laborers as an outlying quarter that was part of Peter Jefferson’s Shadwell Plantation. By the 1770s, it had become home to an overseer and enslaved laborers working on home-farm quarter of his son’s Monticello Plantation.

November 20, 2024

Paper presented at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Williamsburg, VA, November 14-16

By Derek Wheeler and Corey A.H. Sattes

Updated approaches to dating can help reassess legacy assemblages. This paper discusses ways to parse out stratified deposits to define chronological boundaries. We apply this preliminary research to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mulberry Row dwellings and working structures. A historic road adjacent to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Mulberry Road was home to enslaved and white laborers. Our current study adds to past archaeology and analyses of this community by testing different analytical approaches for clarifying stratigraphic groupings. Identifying the most accurate variables for occupational phasing will expand our understanding of how Mulberry Row changed over time.

October 22, 2024

The Monticello Archaeology and DAACS team will be heading to Williamsburg, VA in November for the 80th annual Southeastern Archaeological Conference. We have a wide range of papers, posters, and workshops planned to share our some of our recent archaeological work. Three of these papers will be highlighting efforts to update our methods for analyzing archaeological and artifact data from sites on and off the mountaintop at Monticello. The DAACS team will also be sharing a poster and paper about their recent analysis of the 17th-century settlement at Flowerdew Hundred. Finally, there is a DAACS-hosted workshop on open-science and archaeological data analysis. Check out the abstracts for all of these projects here!

September 10, 2024

Scroll through this image gallery to see examples of vessels so far recovered and analyzed from our current excavation at Site 30. These lead-glazed coarse earthenwares vary significantly in their physical attributes, providing a glimpse into the level of experimentation occurring in American potteries during the late-18th century. Interestingly, a vessel-level analysis showed that there are two identical bowls recovered from Site 30 that resemble similar sherds recovered from Sites 6 and 8 as well as Buildings o and D/j. We are continuing to examine this assemblage to investigate the growing pottery industry in Virginia and how this may expand our understanding of material access during the Revolutionary War and occupation of Site 30.

March 18, 2024

Paper presented at the Mid-Atlantic Archaeological Conference in Ocean’s City, MD March 7-10, 2024

By Corey Sattes and Chris Devine

In 1957 and 1958, two Harvard graduate students—Oriol Pi-Sunyer and Vladimir Markotic—undertook respective archaeological investigations at Monticello. They exposed building foundations on Mulberry Row as well as the garden wall and pavilion. Pi-Sunyer and Markotic collected large and diverse artifact assemblages, including an array of fascinating architectural, metal, and ceramic artifacts associated with the lives of those on the mountaintop. For decades, archaeologists refrained from analyzing the assemblages, which had been boxed together and labeled ambiguously. However, the fortuitous discovery of fieldwork records and subsequent investigations have provided the keys necessary to undertake a re-organization and re-examination of these two projects. This paper will outline the history of these excavations, the methods by which we parsed out their resulting artifacts, and the ways these assemblages will contribute to our historical interpretation of the mountaintop as well as our efforts to curate a collection for educational programming. 

Monticello Magazine Fall/Winter 2023

Did you know that Monticello is home to one of the longest running digital archaeological archives in the world? For over 20 years, the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at Monticello has helped scholars and the public understand the early modern Atlantic World in which Jefferson lived. It does so by sharing archaeological data from early modern slave societies, allowing us to frame Monticello in its larger Atlantic context. Check out some of this work and learn about collaboration between the DAACS team and colleagues in Suriname and St. Croix!

Monticello Magazine Fall/Winter 2023

Monticello is much more than a great place to visit. It’s also a bustling hub of interdisciplinary research, where curators, archaeologists, historians and scholars of all types come together to continually expand the limits of what we know about history. Their work is driven by documentary evidence, material culture, oral histories, and - of course - archaeology. Learn about how archaeological research has been so important for better understanding life at Monticello!

Monticello Magazine Spring 2023

Site 30 2023 Updates

Check out a short summary from the beginning of the 2023 field season at the Monticello Home Farm Quarter Site 30, a domestic site where enslaved field laborers lived in the late 18th century! This is an important archaeological project that is expanding our knowledge of all people living on the plantation and the ways in which they participated in local trade and networks of exchange.

November 23, 2022

Site 30 is an archaeological site located a half-mile southeast of the Monticello mansion and occupied by enslaved agricultural laborers during the 1770s and 1780s. There is also evidence for seasonal occupation by Native Americans here. Check out the updates from the first season of archaeological excavations carried out at Site 30!

Monticello Magazine Winter 2018

Archaeological Clues about Slavery at Monticello

Learn about excavations from Summer 2017 when Monticello archaeologists, aided by students in the Monticello-UVA Archaeological Field School and by participants in the Getting Word Oral History Project, explored a plot of land hidden in the woods. There, in the place known archaeologically as Site 6, a treasure trove of archaeological finds is helping answer new questions about slavery at Monticello.