Peering down into the corner of a dig site in Williamsburg, the eighteenth-century capital of Virginia, archaeologist Mark Kostro watched a field school student scrape away dark gray soil from a layer of yellowish-orange clay beneath it. “That’s encouraging,” he said. “That might possibly be topping a trash pit.” On a hot, humid day last June, students from the College of William & Mary were excavating an area next to a brick outbuilding behind the Carter House, which was built in 1727 by Robert “King” Carter, one of the wealthiest men in colonial Virginia. Kostro was hopeful that the dig would uncover a trash pit containing clues that would explain how the building was used and when it was built.
“It’s very curious,” he said. Most outbuildings in the town were made from inferior materials, and a brick outbuilding would have been an unusual outlay of money. It may have been a laundry, an office, a slave quarters, or a household member may have lived there, he speculated. Kitchens were among the most common outbuildings, but this building’s hearth was unusually small, which suggested that it served a different purpose. Usually, kitchens, dairies, smokehouses, stables, and other outbuildings, were located in the backyards of homes. In the middle of Carter’s backyard, however, archaeologists have instead found evidence of pathways and planting beds that may have been part of a terraced garden.
The field school is part of ongoing archaeological research conducted by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation that began in 1928 after the Reverend W.A.R. Goodwin of Bruton Parish recognized that much of the historic town had survived and he convinced philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to restore and reconstruct the entire city. Now known as Colonial Williamsburg, the 301-acre restored area encompasses eighty-five percent of the historic town and includes eighty-eight original, and more than 300 reconstructed, buildings.
Excerpt, Read More in our Fall 2018 Issue of American Archaeology, Vol. 22 No. 2. Browse Contents : FALL 2018.
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Costumed Interpreters walk up and down Colonial Williamsburg’s Duke of Gloucester Street amid eighty-eight original eighteenth-century homes and shops and more than 400 reconstructed buildings. In 1934 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called DOG Street, as it is known locally, “the most historic avenue in all America.”
Credit: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Ivor Noël Hume (right), Colonial Williamsburg’s first full-time trained archaeologist, excavates a cache of English wine bottles from Wetherburn’s Tavern in 1964-5. The bottles were among 200,000 artifacts excavated from the property.
Credit: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Senior Staff Archaeologist Meredith Poole sorts out postholes from an eighteenth-century fence that enclosed Williamsburg’s Public Armoury during the American Revolution. Between 1776 and 1780, the Armoury’s workforce included gunsmiths, gunstockers, tinsmiths, nail-makers, and blacksmiths. These men were American, African-America, Scottish and French, imprisoned, enslaved, apprenticed and free. Industrial activities at the site ceased, for the most part, in 1780, when the town was taken by the British. Credit: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Colonial Williamsburg / College of William & Mary field school students work at the Robert Carter House. The students exposed a trash midden adjacent to a brick outbuilding seen at the right that likely served as a combination kitchen and slave quarter in the late eighteenth century.
Credit: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Senior Staff Archaeologist Mark Kostro excavates a pit feature filled with oyster shells adjacent to the Wren Building at the College of William and Mary. The discarded shells were left by early eighteenth-century William & Mary students. Credit: Rob Hunter.
2010 archaeological excavation of the ravine adjacent to the reconstructed Charlton’s Coffeehouse. Beginning in 1720 with the filing and leveling of Duke of Gloucester Street, and continuing with the construction of the Coffeehouse in 1750, a series of ravine-altering changes were set in motion. Rain that had previously drained gently off the street was now diverted around the building and cut deep channels into the ravine slope. These channels were soon filled with debris from the coffeehouse including: wine bottles, tumblers, wine glasses, plates, tea wares, chamber pots, food remains and nails. More than a century later, the demolition of the coffeehouse, plus the subsequent construction of a residence on the site (1891), created ground disturbances that covered the 18th-entury ravine layers with three feet of fill. Photo courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Behind Charlton’s Coffeehouse, Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists excavate the edge of the trash midden in 2011 that ultimately yielded more than 70,000 artifacts dating to the mid-1760s. The midden was excavated in two phases, the first, between 1996 and 1998 and the second between 2009 and 2011. The artifacts were similar to those of other Williamsburg tavern sites. In addition to hot beverages, Charlton’s was also serving alcohol, wine, rum punch, and beer.
Credit: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
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