Site 30: Updates from 2022

November 23, 2022

Site 30 is an archaeological site located about a quarter mile east of the Monticello mountaintop. It was home to a small group of enslaved field laborers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Monticello archaeologists, led by Research Manager Crystal O'Connor, began excavations at the site in June and July, with the help of students enrolled in the Monticello-UVA Archaeological Field School. Since then, Crystal and colleagues have continued fieldwork at the site.

This was the first season of excavation at Site 30, so the questions we hoped to answer were basic. Can we more precisely date the occupation?  How many houses once stood on the site?  Were their residents families or unrelated individuals?  To what extent were the site's residents able to sustain household economies independent of Jefferson's provisioning system?  To make a start with these questions, we gridded the site into 20-foot blocks and randomly chose a 5-foot quadrat within each block to excavate. This design assures us that we will be able to make statistically reliable maps of spatial variation in artifact densities across the site.

We are still excavating, processing the artifacts, and cataloguing them into the DAACS database. However, we already have a better understanding of dates. The ceramic assemblage is almost entirely creamware, a type that was popular in the 1770s and 1780s at Monticello and across the British Atlantic. Less than 1% of the sherds are pearlware, a type whose popularity eclipses creamware in the 1790s. The (tentative!) chronological implication is that Site 30 was occupied when tobacco was the sole cash crop at Monticello and abandoned by the time Jefferson made the switch to wheat in the early 1790s.

Figure 1. Artifact density maps from a sample of 5-foot quadrat at Site 30. Quadrat centers are marked by dots. Yellow represents higher densities than blue.

There is more uncertainty about the number of houses that once stood at the site. The density map for  hand-wrought nails shows two peaks, which could correspond to two separate houses. The density map for ceramic sherds also shows two peaks. One of them is coincident with the two nail peaks. However, the second lies well to the south and extends past the southern limit of the area we have sampled with five-foot quadrats.  Could this southern ceramic peak represent a third house? If so, why are there no nails associated with it?  We need more data to solve these puzzles, and we are looking forward to getting back out to Site 30 in the coming field seasons. Until then, see below for some of our Site 30 archaeological finds.