Home From American Archaeology Magazine Current Issue Reading Jefferson’s Landscape

Recent fieldwork adjacent to the mansion has revealed important changes in the ornamental landscape. Credit: Mark East.

Reading Jefferson’s Landscape

Archaeologists are studying the landscape of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello to understand the dramatic changes that took place there in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Dec 7, 2017

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Winter 2017: By David Malakoff.

At first glance, it might not seem like much for archaeologists to work with. At Monticello there are microscopic grains of pollen that wafted from pine and oak trees more than 200 years ago and became buried at the bottom of a muddy stream. Some bricks and patches of discolored sediment that mark the locations of earthen pits that once sat hidden beneath the floorboards of slave quarters. Handfuls of ceramic sherds and rusty nails, some broken or bent. One half of a shattered porcelain plate discovered a half-mile from its mate.

These humble finds, however, are helping archaeologists reveal a tale of profound social, economic, and ecological upheaval at the home of one of America’s most famous founding fathers. Over the past few decades, researchers working at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s iconic home in central Virginia, have acquired a clearer understanding of how the sprawling plantation evolved during the life of the remarkable man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, served as the nation’s third president, and founded the University of Virginia.

Painstaking fieldwork—including the systematic digging of over 20,000 shovel test pits—has yielded new insights into how Jefferson ran his plantation, treated the approximately 600 enslaved people he owned during his lifetime, and reacted to the dramatic economic and political changes in Europe and North America in the late 1700s and early 1800s. This past summer, researchers helped document important spaces linked to Jefferson’s elegant brick mansion, including a room used by Sally Hemings, the enslaved African-American who historians believe gave birth to six of Jefferson’s children, as well as an elaborate brick stove used by Hemings’ brothers to prepare the French cuisine Jefferson savored.

Excerpt.

Read More in our Winter 2017 Issue of American Archaeology, Vol. 20 No. 4. Browse Content of this Issue: WINTER 2017.

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Researchers use quarter-inch mesh screens to recover artifacts from an early nineteenth-century site that was home to enslaved field laborers. Because Monticello soils are so rich in clay, sediment derived from them must be pushed through screens by hand. Credit: Mark East

Students in the Monticello-University of Virginia archaeological field school excavate a single quadrant of fill in a subfloor pit under a slave house from the 1790s at Site 8. Credit: Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Field school students take a core sample from white oak. Dendroecological research has led to the discovery of a circle of trees that date to the late eighteenth century that Jefferson called “the timber zone.” The timber zone separated the ornamental landscape that surrounded Jefferson’s mansion from the agricultural fields. Credit: Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Archaeologist Crystal Ptacek stands on the recently uncovered brick floor of Monticello's original kitchen, in the basement of the South Pavilion. She is pointing to the thermally fractured bricks that mark the location of the original kitchen fireplace that was dismantled around 1809, when a new kitchen was completed closer to Jefferson's mansion. Credit: Mark East. — Archaeologist Crystal Ptacek stands on the recently uncovered brick floor of Monticello’s original kitchen, in the basement of the South Pavilion. She is pointing to the thermally fractured bricks that mark the location of the original kitchen fireplace that was dismantled around 1809, when a new kitchen was completed closer to Jefferson’s mansion. Credit: Mark East.

Monticello archaeologist Karen Smith records a cross section though a small borrow pit at Site 8, a late eighteenth-century domestic site that was once home to enslaved field laborers. Researchers believe this pit and others like it were dug to obtain clay for chinking the log houses and plastering their wooden chimneys that stood nearby. Credit: Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

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