Over the past two months, Monticello’s archaeologists have discovered two previously unknown archaeological sites that were once the homes of slaves who lived at Tufton, about a mile and a quarter east of Jefferson’s mountaintop mansion. Our preliminary assessment of the artifacts indicates that...
“What is the coolest thing you’ve ever found?” This is a question I get often yet it is one of the most difficult to answer. Everything that we find provides valuable information for our research of how people lived in the past, so what we think is “cool” may not be what others would say is “cool...
If only we could showcase everything ! An upcoming exhibition will contain ten panels that investigate the people, buildings, and industries of Mulberry Row. Sadly, reality dictates that only dozens of artifacts of many thousands of artifacts recovered by the Monticello Archaeology Department will...
In the third and final posting this series, we’ll briefly consider how the intellectual legacies of the New Archaeology affect current archaeological practice and our approach to the reanalysis of Pi-Sunyer ( part 1 ) and Kelso’s ( part 2 ) finds on Mulberry Row. Today, 30 years after Kelso’s work...
As we saw last time , Oriel Pi-Sunyer conducted the first serious archaeogical fieldwork on Mulberry Row in 1957. He relied on an excavation method called cross trenching, whose main goal was finding and exposing masonry foundations. Over 20 years later, William Kelso brought a different set of...
Everyone knows that archaeologists dig. But it is less widely appreciated that just how they dig and what they find varies with the kinds of questions they ask and the assumptions they make. Two excavation campaigns were conducted on Mulberry Row -- the first in 1957 and the second in the early...
First Archaeology Workshop Tours Monticello Mountain Monticello’s archaeologists hosted the first in a series of four Archaeology Workshops on Saturday, April 23. Visitors joined archaeology staff members for a 2.5-mile walk across the southern slopes of Monticello Mountain. The group visited...
"So you work in the Archaeology Lab...but what do you do, exactly?" This is a question I have received a lot over the years from friends and visitors alike. The answer is, quite a variety of things, actually. Archaeology entails a lot more than the digging part. That’s what I love about it; it’s a...
In 2009, members of the Monticello Archaeology staff teamed up with zoological archaeologist Joanne Bowen from Colonial Williamsburg to present a collaborative academic poster at the Society for American Archaeology annual conference. The following is a summary of that research. Introduction From...
... Thomas Jefferson made what's considered to be the first American contribution to vertebrate paleontology. Wired.com has the story , and notes that 52 years after Jefferson's scientific accomplishment, Abraham Lincoln made his own technical triumph, becoming the only U.S. president to patent an...
