Human-animal relationships are entangled, with the rhythm of our daily practice structured by the needs of nonhuman companions. Similar rhythms existed in the past – daily rhythms of animal care and seasonal/yearly rhythms involving exploitation of resources. Alongside standard zooarchaeological methods, which largely focus on the animal at death, I use geometric morphometrics and stable isotope analysis to investigate changes to dietary intake and mobility in individuals, elucidating the lived experiences of animals to explore human-animal-environmental interactions, livestock management practices, and the impacts of Eurasian species on Indigenous Chesapeake landscapes. Using archaeofaunal remains as proxy data reflects human adaptation in the region by placing quantifiable aspects of the archaeological record into conversation with less tangible aspects of animal-human-environmental interactions. These methods attempt to move zooarchaeological interpretation beyond subsistence practices to illuminate routine practice and the use of spaces and boundaries, framed by multispecies theory considering animals as agents of change.

During the 2020–2021 COVID-19 shutdown, a treefall on the edge of a bluff at the Chancellor’s Point site at Historic St. Mary’s City (HSMC), Maryland partially exposed a buried ancestor of African descent. A second ancestor was found nearby interred at the base of a tall tree near the bluff’s edge. Both ancestors were buried with their faces pointing towards the mouth of the St. Mary’s River. In the months that followed, a group of community stakeholders formed the Chancellor’s Point Working Group (CPWG) to advise HSMC on the respectful rescue and commemoration of ancestors buried at Chancellor’s Point. In this paper, we outline the history of this project and share the ethical framework crafted by the CPWG that guides our path forward, a framework that prioritizes humanity, defines descendancy broadly, and emphasizes reparatory story expansion.

Flowerdew Hundred, a 1000-acre plantation tract located on the south side of the James River in Virginia was the focus of decades of excavations by the College of William and Mary and University of California, Berkley. Three sites – 44PG64, 64/65 and 65 – represent one of the earliest 17th century settlements occupied by enslaved and indentured laborers and landowning elites. Over the last three years the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (www.DAACS.org) has worked to reunite and digitize field records and catalog artifacts from these sites. This case study, for the first time, comprehensively examines artifact distributions from all three sites to investigate whether it is possible to determine if space was arranged according to social status, resident ethnicity, or by functional distinctions. We argue that understanding the longer trajectory of occupation and spatial arrangements provides important insights into the multicultural dynamics behind the emergence and establishment of race-based slavery in Virginia.

Disturbed sites, disparate grids, and limited excavations are all-too-common in historical archaeology. But tricky archaeological projects nonetheless play a central role in the way that descendant communities reconnect with former plantation landscapes. This paper examines archaeological evidence from St. Inigoes, a Maryland plantation where enslaved persons labored to support Jesuit missionaries. St. Inigoes has seen decades of discrete excavations. We use both the curated and newly-excavated collections—including architecture, domestic material culture, and environmental evidence—in order to reconstruct the landscape of ca. 1660-1760 Old Chapel Field. In particular, we differentiate between public and private spaces, and highlight spaces where enslaved persons lived or worked. This paper explores the extent to which limited archaeological investigations can “recreate” forgotten spaces for community members.

Forty years of excavation at Monticello have yielded artifacts from thousands of contexts created by diverse taphonomic processes. These include spatially scattered quadrats in plowzone sites, lithostratigraphic units from sites with extensive horizontal stratification, and discrete features. This paper describes our efforts to develop reproducible methods for aggregating artifacts from these contexts into "counting units." These units are designed to contain artifacts discarded by a single household during an identifiable period, with sample sizes large enough to support reliable analyses. We present a reproducible workflow that reveals relationships among units defined as: clusters of assemblages based on type-frequency similarity, clusters of artifacts in 2-D space, and groups of stratified contexts representing major depositional events. Understanding these relationships allows us to assess how these units correspond to households, providing a foundation for further analysis. Data and R code will be available on the OSF website.

In the Spring of 2024, Mount Vernon archaeologists recovered 29 intact bottles of fruit from a series of sub-floor storage pits in the cellar of Washington’s 18th century mansion. The bottles were carefully placed and intentionally buried under the floor between 1758-1775. Resting in situ for a quarter millennium, the bottles contained extraordinarily well-preserved cherries and berries, samples of which are currently undergoing analysis by a team of scientists at the USDA. The astonishing long-term survival of highly perishable fruit picked and prepared over 250 years ago is a testament to the skill and knowledge of Doll, an enslaved cook bound to Mount Vernon’s kitchen, and to the enslaved people that managed food preparations from tree to table. This discovery provides an incredibly rare opportunity to contribute to our understanding of the 18^th century Chesapeake environment, emerging plantation foodways, and the making of an American cuisine.

Recent excavations and archaeological record re-study projects have enabled considerable changes in the interpretation of the George Washington Birthplace National Monument National Monument (NPS). Sites there have been the subject of excavations from as early as the 1890s and has seen several digging approaches and methodologies over the years. The park has played an important role in Chesapeake regional archaeological history just as generations of differently formatted and executed excavations have helped shape the park’s interpreted story. One persistent issue though in this work is the question of how we know what we know – the ontology of archaeological knowledge – challenged by deeply entrenched stories fed by many different streams. The park and its many excavations spread over time force us to consider the intersections of received stories, the assumptions implicit in methodologies, the needs of desires of interested communities and partners in the creation of archaeological interpretation.

In 2020, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation began excavating the site of the original First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, one of the nation’s oldest extant Black congregations. From the beginning, the project has been a partnership with the current First Baptist Church congregation, many of whom are descendants of its founding generations. As media attention grew around the project, descendants from outlying, often displaced, communities began joining the conversation. After seeing their histories minimized or erased at Colonial Williamsburg, many have a longstanding distrust in our institution. Beyond that, mistrust and intercommunity politics between the current First Baptist Church congregation and the members of its daughter and granddaughter churches often impact our growing partnership. This paper discusses First Baptist Church archaeology project and efforts to build trust in Colonial Williamsburg and rebuild connections between long-alienated communities and their connections to the church and its significance to our nation’s history.

The Clientage Model, as defined by Dr. Michael Blakey and his team, is one in which the archaeologists give the descendants primacy in defining the research and interpretive agenda directed towards their ancestral material record. We have strove to have descendants guide our approach to the archaeological record at Montpelier. One of the more significant questions descendants have raised is how the archaeological record reflects their ancestors’ intellectual contributions. This has helped us rethink our approach to interpreting the archaeological record--and moved us towards an archaeology of intellectual labor across the landscape. In this presentation, I will explore the insights gleaned from this perspective and how this has changed our collective understanding of the plantation landscape--both for staff archaeologists and for descendants. From this work, descendants have termed the larger archaeological record as an ancestral memory device and have become a primary partner in preserving this resource.

Recent efforts have focused on completing the first phase of the 1857 Slave Dwelling Restoration Project at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest. This collaborative partnership with members of the African American community is designed to explore the history and legacy of this building – the only structure designed to house enslaved African Americans still standing at this National Historic Landmark located in the Virginia Piedmont. Spanning the periods of slavery, emancipation, and the Jim Crow Era, this building provides a powerful opportunity to tell and preserve the stories of African Americans associated with the pre- and post-bellum history of the plantation. The results of excavations and artifact analysis are providing important new windows into the lives of those who lived in this building as well as additional insights into the broader scope of the property’s history. Future phases will also be briefly touched on as work continues on this important new project.

This paper examines the 1857 Slave Dwelling at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Bedford County, Virginia, as an object with its own life-history. Originally built as housing for enslaved laborers, the structure has seen several modifications during its existence, while it has gradually deteriorated since it lacks a foundation and water drainage is ineffective. Archaeological investigations of the structure began in 1989, followed by intensive excavation between 2022 and 2024 in preparation for installation of a foundation and drainage trench, prior to masonry repair and interior restoration. This allows an opportunity to consider this building as a contiguous object that is composed of above- and below-ground elements, primarily brick and mortar, plus architectural materials from archaeological contexts. Traditional forms of documentation and photogrammetry are being used to record the structure at this stage in its lifetime, focusing on bricks and mortar visible on the exterior and associated artifacts.

Iron plantations played diverse economic roles in the early mid-Atlantic. While designed to refine and transport iron products along waterways to regional markets or specialty iron operations, iron plantations also served as nodes of bidirectional exchange between Virginia’s coastal and inland areas, including seasonal hiring of enslaved individuals. This paper explores connections found between the Shenandoah Valley and Chesapeake regions at the Buffalo Forge iron plantation in Glasgow, Virginia. Buffalo Forge’s advantageous position on Buffalo Creek, a tributary of the James River, facilitated connections to diverse people, places, and resources across the Chesapeake Bay watershed. In investigating the origins of oyster shell, ceramics, and other material culture recovered around two enslaved women’s and family quarters at Buffalo Forge, this paper aims to illuminate enslaved women’s and the broader the enslaved community’s active participation in intra-state exchange at and beyond the iron plantation.

In the decades following the Civil War, opportunities for land ownership for Black citizens both created and sustained rural communities in the second half of the 19th century. A recent NPS-funded interdisciplinary project studied the shifting demographics of land ownership in a small rural southern Maryland community known as Wallsville. Starting in the postbellum period and continuing to the mid-20th century, this project assessed patterns of land ownership and social and economic conditions using archaeological and documentary research, oral histories, and community consultation. The patterns seen in Wallsville mirror those seen throughout small communities in the Mid Atlantic.