Revolutionizing Archaeology at Monticello

David Thorson: Hello, my name is David Thorson. I'm a Digital Guide at Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello. You're listening to a special podcast series called Sharing History: 100 Years of Telling American Stories at Monticello.

Today we're going to talk about archaeology at Monticello. Archaeological research has expanded our perception of Jefferson, Monticello, the surrounding plantation landscape, and the lives and labors of Monticello's enslaved community.

You're going hear from three people who have been pivotal in this research.

Fraser Neiman: I am Fraser Neiman, Director of Archaeology here at Monticello.

Jillian Galle: I'm Jillian Galle, I'm the Project Director for the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery.

Doug Sanford: And I am Douglas Sanford. I'm a retired Professor in Historic Preservation from the University of Mary Washington, and I was an archaeologist here at Monticello between 1979 and 1985.

Early Excavations on the North and South Wings

David Thorson: The foundation's first archeological dig was carried out in 1937 at Monticello's North Wing, a basement area where Jefferson had an icehouse, tack room, and carriage bays. Milton Grigg, an architect and historic preservationist, wanted to find out how the space was partitioned. He used an innovative technique called cross trenching, digging long parallel trenches, spaced at regular intervals with a hope they would intersect with stone or brick foundations.

Fraser Neiman: He dug his cross trenches, unfortunately, he found essentially nothing, and the reason was because the partitions of that space were made of wood, not brick, and he was unable to recognize the rotted traces of those wooden partitions. In the absence of archaeological evidence he went down to Bremo Plantation, which is in Fluvanna county, where a beautifully preserved stable survives from the 1820s, and he essentially duplicated the Bremo stables in the North Wing.

The bad news is that a fellow named Edwin Betts, who was a UVA professor, discovered a Jefferson letter just as Grigg's restoration was being completed which showed definitively that Jefferson actually didn't have horse stalls in the North Wing, but rather carriage bays. That's kind of the well intentioned first attempt, but it didn't have the payoffs that were hoped for.

David Thorson: Next, Grigg excavated the South Wing. He found evidence of Monticello's original kitchen but didn’t realize exactly what it was. When we re-excavated that area recently, we made some significant discoveries, which you’ll hear about later in the podcast. While laudable efforts, Monticello’s initial forays into archaeology were not particularly fruitful.

1957 Excavations on Mulberry Row

David Thorson: That changed in 1957, when Monticello Curator James Bear hired a Spanish-born, Harvard-trained archaeologist named Oriol Pi-Sunyer. Pi-Sunyer excavated parts of Mulberry Row, the area located between the south wing of the house and Jefferson’s 1,000-foot-long vegetable garden. This is where dozens of enslaved people lived and worked.

Fraser Neiman: Jim Bear's goal was to investigate industrial spaces, spaces associated with Jefferson's attempts to do small-scale craft production using the labor of enslaved people. Pi-Sunyer ran trenches down the western edge of Mulberry Row, where he discovered the foundations of a building that Jefferson calls the storehouse for iron, and then the blacksmith shop, and the joiner shop.

The innovation that Pi-Sunyer brought was that he, unlike Grigg, systematically collected artifacts. He found a lot of architectural debris, we think perhaps from the blacksmith shop, a lot of nail-making debris from Jefferson's nail-making operation. There are fair number of domestic artifacts as well.

David Thorson: By collecting and analyzing large numbers of artifacts, archaeologists can date a site and understand  how it was used over time. Pi-Sunyer didn’t carry out that analysis, but he saved the artifacts, so later archaeologists could.

1979 Investigation of the Ornamental Farm

David Thorson: In 1979, James Bear invited archaeologist William Kelso to investigate Monticello’s landscape. Archaeology was a first step in realizing an ambitious and visionary landscape restoration plan, devised by Director Restoration William Beiswanger. 

Fraser Neiman: From a landscape archaeology perspective, the Foundation acquires Monticello in 1923 and the history of the Foundation's landscaping activities between '23 and the late '70s was not a really happy story. It was a story of parking lot construction, and the construction of parking lots on the top of the mountain right next to the house. 

This had happened gradually over a period of time, and all of a sudden, folks woke up and said, “Whoa, why have we got these acres of asphalt right next to Mulberry Row, right next to Jefferson's mansion?” I think it's important to give Bill Beiswanger his due, because Bill saw it was possible to do something about this, and Bill Kelso's work with the garden and later Mulberry Row were really the key steps in making that change.

David Thorson: Doug Sanford was a young archaeologist working in the field at the time and saw first-hand the far-reaching effects of these efforts.

Doug Sanford: The initial emphasis was on exploring the landscape, the gardens, the grounds, etc., with the ultimate goal of restoring a number of these landscape elements. At the time, the subfield of landscape archaeology was not well-developed, so this was sort of an experimental stage.

The whole emphasis at first was on the thousand-foot terrace garden. We also looked for fences that enclosed many acres, orchards, vineyards. If you're going to put in a post for a fence, or you're going to dig a hole and put in a young fruit tree, by disturbing that soil in a limited area, that changes the soil's color and composition, typically makes it more organic, which means darker brown, and you can distinguish that against the surrounding red clay, what we call a soil stain. And then you see a pattern, a post hole for the fence post every 10 feet, something like that.

A lot of people said, why are you doing this archaeology? You have all these hundreds of documents from Jefferson. What we know with Thomas Jefferson is that some things are documented which actually happened, some were his plans, his dreams. For instance, he had different plans for the orchard, so which plan is correct? That's where we could archaeologically verify one of those.

1980s Research on Mulberry Row

David Thorson: The next phase of archaeology, in the 1980s, changed our understanding of the Monticello plantation, but the transition from researching the landscape to excavating sites of slavery happened almost by chance.

Doug Sanford: It was in some ways not anticipated, but this had to do with tracing the various fence lines and paling wall that sealed off Mulberry Row from the garden. Part of that fencing went along the edge of Mulberry Row, and as we were digging along there, we were running into very complex archaeological deposits, what Pi-Sunyer had initially encountered in the '50s. 

There were various historic versions of Mulberry Row, how it was organized, but always this combination of housing for enslaved African Americans and then the functional outbuildings of any plantation, but also a very substantial blacksmith shop and a nail producing factory. So, we were seeing parts of buildings and ceramics and more of the nailery and the blacksmith shop.

To do archaeological justice to all this evidence, we had to record it. I think we also realized, look, Mulberry Row is obviously part of the landscape as well. We realized this very important piece of Monticello was just starting to be probed, and it made perfect sense to expand the archaeology, which, eventually, Bill Kelso obtained a National Endowment for the Humanities grant specifically focused on Mulberry Row, the various types of buildings, the everyday world of work there, but also the enslaved community at Monticello.

This was a revelation to us, because historical archaeologists had not looked at a tremendous number of sites like these. And so some of our goals were pretty descriptive. What are the ceramics like? What are the personal possessions like? Can we recognize how much of their goods were provided by Jefferson? How else might they acquire them? We were just having an inkling that there actually were a fair amount of enslaved people as consumers, that they had access to money, that they were purchasing goods, they had access to stores, etc. So we see a very different sort of lifestyle suggested there.

Jillian Galle: Exactly. Monticello, I think, really was the first place that was doing large-scale excavations to uncover multiple domestic structures and industrial dependency structures related to enslavement in North America. So it was a proving ground for, how do you begin to understand these buildings and the remains that are coming from them, and to understand what life was like along a place like Mulberry Row?

Doug Sanford: This is now considered standard knowledge for these sorts of sites, but I think we saw how resourceful, creative they were. Yes, they were given certain rations and provisions. Those are at a pretty minimal level, and so they are hunting, they are fishing, gathering. They're trading, bartering for goods, purchasing goods as well. It's sort of this vibrant internal economy for the enslaved people of how they're helping to sustain one another, families, community.

Jillian Galle: There's these incredible documents that tell us that enslaved people at Monticello were, in fact, raising chickens, selling chickens, selling eggs back to the Jefferson family and earning money that way. Archaeologically, we see the articles of that labor. We see the sewing pins. We have a cow scapula with bone buttons stamped out of it, so people making their own buttons for their clothing. At the same time, though, we see high-style, what would've been costly buttons that were in all likelihood being purchased.

Fraser Neiman: Just another example—there are tablewares in the nailery, faunal remains, the remains of people's meals, so the suspicion is that these are young teenagers, males, probably sleeping there.

Doug Sanford: What Jefferson refers to as the nail boys.

Jillian Galle: The tablewares were, a lot of them, high-style porcelain, and they're in mismatched sets. Can we imagine that some of these young boys are being sent up from the field, we know they often have been raised in outlying field quarters, and they're being sent up to Mulberry Row to work for a brief period. Are their families scraping together a plate and a saucer for them to go up? These raise a whole sort of host of questions about how these ceramics get to the sites.

David Thorson: Monticello visitors were curious about the archeological digs along Mulberry Row. For many, it was surprising to see the physical evidence of slavery right next to Jefferson's home. The public had lots of questions for the archeologists.

Doug Sanford: Our public interpretation, at first, was truly ad hoc. We just had not anticipated seeing hundreds, even thousands, of people per day, and so over time we got a little more organized about it and had signs up and we could show people drawings and maps and photographs, show artifacts of what we were finding. Some people were very intrigued, and you could tell some people were uncomfortable about it, there was resistance to telling this story.

So that's where we realized we could make a difference in public outreach. We were asked often the same question hundreds of times, and so we would call it being on the front line. It's like, “Okay, Fraser, you're up here for the next hour or two, and then Doug, get back up there, you're up.” We had just great conversations with people who brought their particular interest to what we were doing. It was trial by fire.

We never had a formal relationship with the guides. As you look back now, it's like, why didn't we just have a couple of informal sessions where we can say, here's what we're finding, how they could use our information on their tours.

1990s

David Thorson: After the comprehensive investigation of Mulberry Row, archaeologists became interested in the wider plantation.  

Fraser Neiman: So I come to Monticello in 1995, and it struck me that a blazingly obvious opportunity was to begin to explore the several thousand acres of land that the Foundation owns that comprised roughly half of Jefferson's original 5,000-acre holding. That realization led to three research initiatives that we are still pursuing.

First, the Plantation Archaeological Survey, which is our attempt to find every archaeological site on the property. We do this using shovel test pits, digging a shovel test pit about every 40 feet on a regular grid. So far, we've dug about 26,000 of them and found scores of Jefferson archaeological sites.

The second initiative was the Plantation Household Archaeology Project, in which once we found a domestic site, we try to investigate it in more detail and collect the kind of data that we could begin to use to compare to sites on Mulberry Row.

And then the third one is the Historical Ecology Initiative, and here we're using methods borrowed from geology, so for example, sediment grain size analysis, sediment chemistry, pollen analysis, phytolith analysis, to try to track changes over time in the environment caused by human intervention. And the two things that we're really focused on there are the impacts of initial European settlement to the landscape, gradual deforestation, and then in the late 18th century, the momentous, it turns out, transition from tobacco cultivation to wheat cultivation.

DAACS

David Thorson: You'll hear more about the transition from tobacco to wheat cultivation in a moment.

The archeological surveys proved critical to understanding that transition. And a fourth initiative, the creation of a comprehensive database, enabled the comparative analysis of the information collected over decades of effort.

Fraser Neiman: Bill Kelso was a great excavator, but as a byproduct of that, he left us with hundreds and hundreds of boxes of artifacts, many of which were never analyzed. If you think about this, he's here in the 1980s, so archaeologists are just starting to use computers a little bit, but they don't really understand how databases work. Mid-'90s, PCs have finally gotten powerful enough to be able to handle heavy duty spatial computations that are required by computer drafting systems, geographical information systems, heavy duty number crunching—so all that capability all of a sudden exists in the late '90s.

There's a lot of interest out there in the discipline and, okay, this is great, how are we going to use these methods? And the results of that is the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, or DAACS, which was initially founded with funding from the Mellon Foundation.

Jillian Galle: When Fraser says there's hundreds of boxes from Mulberry Row and lots of artifacts, we're talking hundreds of thousands of artifacts. So, let's look at every single artifact, standardize the information that we're gathering from these artifacts, and put them into a database. That idea was novel on such a large scale.

And what was even more novel was to say we're not just doing this for Monticello, we are going to do this for sites of enslavement across the Chesapeake—from Mount Vernon, from Poplar Forest, from sites excavated in and around Colonial Williamsburg. And so that was another, I think, critical component of the start of DAACS.

Fraser hired me in 2000 to build it and run it. And DAACS has grown over the past 24 years to include over 85 domestic sites. From those 85 sites of enslavement, we have data from over 4 million artifacts that the public can access through the website. We really spent the first 13 to 15 years of the archive amassing these data. We still are, we're still working on big cataloging projects out of the DAACS lab at Monticello.

David Thorson: Now let's get back to Jefferson's decision to start growing wheat in addition to tobacco and how that changed the daily lives of enslaved people at Monticello.

Fraser Neiman: When people ask about the outcome of this larger project, I think the headline answer is regional variation is really a function of the crop that enslaved people are growing. It's really a function of the kind of labor that people are doing. What's allowed us to see that is not only comparisons within the Chesapeake, but then comparing the Chesapeake to South Carolina, where rice is the major crop, and especially our forays into the Caribbean, where sugar is critical. Settlement patterns, the kinds of consumer goods to which people have access, etc., really varies along that continuum.

Jillian Galle: And that's because the type of crop that's being cultivated directly impacts the rhythm of an enslaved person's day. If you're an enslaved person who is having to work tobacco, it is a gang labor system, 12-plus hours a day in the field, with very little time on either end of sunrise and sunset to cultivate gardens, to invest your own labor into the sorts of crafts that could earn somebody money.

Whereas if you are working in, say, wheat, that's one of these, what we'd call task-based labor systems, where there are very intense work cycles and then other periods in which it might not be a full 12 hours or you might get shifted off of field work to doing some form of skilled labor or you might get leased out and have experiences off of the plantation. There's a whole host of contextual factors that impacted a person's daily life. But we tend to see that those who are living on estates that have task-based agriculture regimes tend to be able to engage in the market economy more.

David Thorson: Even within the Monticello plantation itself, enslaved people had different types and quantities of material goods, depending on the type of work they did.

Jillian Galle: We can see at a site like Monticello, where you have Mulberry Row, where people are living on a tobacco plantation, but perhaps in a more task-based part of a plantation, versus those who are living in the quarter areas where they're engaged in gang-based labor every day, we definitely see material differences at Monticello in that way.

Fraser Neiman: I think one of the big take-homes from our Monticello research is that there really are two Monticello plantations. There's the tobacco plantation and then, starting in the 1790s, Jefferson transitions to wheat and then actually starts to grow both crops at the same time. This sort of general trend towards agricultural and, more generally, economic diversification changed radically the kinds of labor that enslaved people did and shifted the kinds of strategies that they could use to make marginal improvements in their daily lives.

Doug Sanford: We don't have any surviving slave quarters from the 17th century, and we have, literally, a handful from the 18th century. So if you want to talk about this subject, you've got to turn to archaeology. We just don't have the above ground buildings to look at anymore, so if you want to characterize something as basic as what type of housing did enslaved people have, it's up to archaeology.

Jillian Galle: Being able to talk about a person's daily life. How are they making choices about their household, how their labor is allocated, what they're eating, how they're dressing? The only way that we can understand that is through the archaeological record. There's simply not the documentary record.

David Thorson: The Digital Archive of Comparative Slavery, or DACCS, has made a transformative difference in the field of archaeology itself.

Jillian Galle: In the last 10 years, one of our foci has become really serving as a core research facility for training archaeologists. We have graduate students, professors who come work with us every year to not only learn our cataloging protocols but we also teach people how to identify artifacts, how to know how to date those ceramics. We're currently working with students and scholars who are working in Haiti, on St. Croix, Surinam, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Texas, Tennessee, locally, just even around the corner here in Virginia.

As we look into the future with DAACS, we see not only the continued growth of the archive, which will allow the scholars for free to explore all of these corners of the early modern Atlantic world, but we get to expand the number of people that we help.

Doug Sanford: Jillian, you bring up a good point about education. When we came here in 1979, we didn't have the intention, oh, there will be a full-time archaeological program here at Monticello or a training ground for future archaeologists, doing the field schools.

Jillian Galle: Yeah, my read on this is that Monticello has the longest running archaeological field school in historical archaeology.

Fraser Neiman: Yeah, 1980, I think.

Doug Sanford: I think '80 or '81. DAACS in a way, for me, points out the usual formula of archaeology: for every hour you're in the field, there's at least 3, 4, 5 hours indoors. And so the popular perception of archaeologists, oh, they're out there digging up cool stuff out in the field, and then somehow over the winter they produce a report or an article or something, really, most of archaeology occurs indoors, and it's this sort of cataloging, research, comparison, analysis that allows the larger conclusions about the topics that we're interested in.

Jillian Galle: It's like any other type of historical research. It takes years, if not decades, to produce syntheses. We are the go-to resource for the material legacy of enslavement in North America and the Caribbean, and we need to continue to expand the regions we work in, the types of sites that are included in DAACS.

A second path for us is to help scholars who are in graduate school and beyond learn how to use archaeological data on a large, comparative scale. This is the way we're going to make progress in understanding differences within sites and among sites. We try to provide tools to not only get a handle on cataloging your data and making it accessible, but also how to create arguments about the past and then work with the data to try to see if you're right or wrong.

Mountaintop Project

David Thorson: In 2018, Monticello completed the Mountaintop Project, a multi-year effort to remove modern structures from the mountaintop and preserve and restore Mulberry Row, the upper floors of the House, and Jefferson’s historic Kitchen Road. The Foundation also renewed Monticello's infrastructure, including water, sewer, and HVAC systems. Archaeologists were on call for what’s called Cultural Resource Management.

Fraser Neiman: This essentially means when the Foundation is contemplating putting in new sewer systems, for example, we get out there and make sure that we're not going to destroy archaeological remains. This required five years of nonstop field work to try to stay ahead of the bulldozers. The downside to CRM is that where one digs, we don't get to choose that based on where we think the greatest research payoff is. Rather, that's decided for us by the designers of the geothermal heating system. But we did find some cool stuff.

David Thorson: This brings us back to Milton Grigg’s excavations in the 1940s, when he uncovered an early kitchen at Monticello. Archaeologists reexamined the basement under the South Pavilion again and discovered something quite rare.

Fraser Neiman: This was the earliest structure that Jefferson built on the mountaintop. He and his wife lived, for a time, upstairs, and the basement was Monticello's first kitchen, and it remained Monticello's kitchen from 1770 up until 1809, when the wings that we see today were completed and the new kitchen was installed at the opposite end of the South Wing. But the original kitchen was preserved, buried under fill since 1809.

Now, Grigg, as I said, put some test trenches in that area, didn't quite understand what he was looking at in the 1940s, and we were fortunate enough to be able to put a couple of test trenches in, largely because the Foundation was ripping out a men's room that had been installed in this space.

So in doing this, we discovered, as Grigg had seen, the original kitchen fireplace, but more importantly, what he did not see, which is the foundation of a stew stove. A stew stove is essentially an 18th century cooktop, a brick construction with small grates on the top of it, and then below the grate you could put coals taken from the fireplace and then cook things on top of it. Stew stoves were really necessary in order to make French cuisine, which requires control of heat.

So, it's clear that Jefferson is interested in French cuisine from the very start. We know from documents that he took James Hemings with him to Paris when he was ambassador to France in the 1780s to be trained as a French chef. Hemings has been trained with the premier chefs of Paris, he knows what these things look like, how they work, etc. And our current best guess is that the stew stove that we found is James Hemings's stew stove. It's really unusual that one finds an artifact, in this case, a bit of architecture, that's associated with an enslaved person whose name you know. So that was the highlight of the mountaintop cultural resource management work.

Conclusion

David Thorson: When you visit Monticello, you can see James Hemings’s kitchen along with some of the artifacts our archaeologists have found over the years.

You can also take a Plantation Archaeology Walking Tour, a 90-minute program to see one of the sites discovered in our archaeological surveys and to learn more about how we use archaeology to better understand the plantation and the lives of those who lived and labored here.

Fraser Neiman: What's left for the future? So I talked about the plantation survey, 26,000 shovel test pits. It turns out that's only about a third of the property that we currently own. What we've surveyed so far is mostly Monticello mountain. But the question is, what's going on the outlying quarter farms? I think that's the first step in additional research at Monticello.

And of course, once we find those sites, we can then begin to focus more deeply on them to try to extract their ecological histories and understand better variation in household organization between Monticello mountain itself versus these outlying quarter farms.

Jillian Galle: So many of these iconic sites that were excavated don't actually have full site reports written about them, but by actually re-analyzing the data and making them accessible, we're opening the door to a wide range of new research. We're saying to the masses, have at these data, bring your own ideas, your own theories, and use them to explore the past.

This has been so great. Doug and Fraser have been my colleagues for so long, they're giants in the field, and... All right, I'll start over again, Fraser, I see you're totally embarrassed by that. It's just been excellent to be in conversation with Fraser and Doug who've worked at Monticello for so long and to get to hear their stories.

Doug Sanford: Yeah, and it's nice for me in the same way. These are true colleagues of mine that I've appreciated all these years.

Fraser Neiman: Yes, it's great to have a chance to look back at the past and maybe make a few plans for the future. So thanks, Jillian. Thanks, Doug.