Heath Farm Camp Archeological Site

Transcription

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] NARRATOR: UT Anthropology assistant professor Barbara Heath is using archaeology to try to give a voice to a community who would otherwise go largely unheard: the 18th century slaves of Virginia. HEATH: There’s been a fair amount of archaeology done in certain areas of the south, but there’s been much less archaeology done in the area where I work, the Piedmont. There’s a lot of historical documentation but much of it tends to be written from the perspective of the owners of slaves or the plantation owners, and very little of it is from the perspective of the people who were enslaved. NARRATOR: But now archaeology is helping to tell that story. Every summer since 2007, Heath and her students have been methodically excavating tracts of land previously owned by Thomas Jefferson at the historic Poplar Forest plantation and at Indian Camp. PTACEK: Right now I’m looking for artifacts. We’re screening all of the soil that Hubert is putting into my screen. This is quarter inch mesh so any artifacts that we consider worth saving will be caught in the screen. In one unit that we just finished a couple days ago we have a lot of wrought nails, as you can see, which is really cool. And we also have some clinch nails. And we have two pieces of wine bottle glass The material culture is helping us—with artifacts, ceramics, the different pieces of pottery that we found—is helping us to really understand these people better. HEATH: We find a variety of things that would have been around their house that for whatever reason they were thrown away; they were broken or they were lost and so they end up buried in the ground. This is a good example of an artifact that helps us figure out where we are in terms of time period. This is an English wine bottle. It was made sometime between 1750 and 1780. The manufacturing technique changes a little bit over time and the overall shape of the bottle changes over time, so by looking at clues we can come up with a good date range for when people would have been using this bottle and when it was made. One of the more interesting ones is this little seal. It’s made out of brass and it’s holding a piece of glass that has a carved decoration on the surface of it. And this is called a fob seal; when you were writing a letter or sealing a document you’d dip it in wax and then put an impression on it. This particular seal, the symbolism of it is associated with British royalty and we’re not sure why this particular set of symbols is on this little seal that shows up at a slave cabin around the time of the American revolution in Virginia, so we’re doing some research to try to figure that out. But this is one of the more unusual things that we found. NARRATOR: And aside from the valuable artifacts, the students are also finding valuable lessons about what it means to be an archaeologist. PTACEK: Archaeology is really multidisciplinary; we draw from a lot of different fields; we draw from history, anthropology, science; it’s really nice though to take what you’ve been working on during school and during work and applying that to the field. HEATH: Archaeology tends to be romanticized. You know, the public sees archaeology through the media like Indiana Jones—probably most people have seen. I think a lot of students don’t realize the amount of detail and precision that goes into it. I don’t think a lot of students realize how physical it is. And I think some students think they’d like to do archaeology but after two or three days in August with ticks crawling on them they think, “Well maybe not.” There’s a side of it that keeps you fit and keeps you on your feet and then there’s another side of it that makes you sit back and think, “Okay, what does all this mean?” And at the end of the summer, besides having lost five pounds, what have we learned? NARRATOR: So far they’ve learned quite a bit—but, there’s still more work to be done. HEATH: Our long term goal is to pull all this together and be able to tie the community at Indian Camp and Poplar Forrest together and perhaps down the road look at some of the other plantations where other members of this community had lived and start to create an understanding of the network of enslaved people as it developed in central Virginia from the 1730s up until the turn of the 19th century.