White Ceramics, White Tenant Farmers

There have been many interesting discoveries and a lot learned in the four short weeks of the field school. From learning the tools of the trade, to how and why archaeologists dig the way they do, it has been a very rewarding experience. However beyond learning the day to day operations of the field school, it is important to remember that as archaeologists the goal is to better understand the past. Therefore it is important to know how what is found on the dig contributes to the greater knowledge of the area.

The population that is of interest to the field school is late seventeenth and early eighteenth century tenant farmers living on Morven Farms. The goal of the field school is to better understand this segment of early American population that has received less attention than the two extremes of the population; the extremely influential, such as Thomas Jefferson, and the extremely mistreated, such as the slaves. While there are many theories surrounding this population, and many facets of their lives that are poorly understood, one interesting facet of their life that the field school helped illuminate was how they self-identified, and what other members of the population they considered their equals.

The information most useful to helping establish how the tenant farmers may have viewed themselves is the kind of earthenware found on the site. The earthenware and the refined earthenware especially, can help determine how the tenant farmers may have viewed themselves because of the social indicators that much of the refined earthenware plays a role as. For example by finding polychrome pieces or cream-ware and pearl-ware that has a stamped pattern which is indicative of a piece made in a factory in England, one can deduce that it was important for the tenant farmers to maintain the most current forms of earthenware. While it may have been cheaper to buy or produce plainer wares, the need to identify with the Caucasian ethnic group led the tenant farmers to value the finer forms of pottery. It was important for the tenant farmers to recognize an identity that is framed within their ethnic group, so non-white populations, who were being used as slave labor, could become viewed less as people and more as another means of production. While the tenant farmers themselves may not have benefited as greatly from the slave system as the larger plantation homesteads, by playing into the social roles of the time they could gain a higher social standing than by the wealth they produced alone. There is much still to be learned about the middling classes that existed around the founding of our nation, but by working at sites like Morven more is learned every day.

-Zachary Huey ’13

A Brazilian Archaeologist’s Thoughts on Virginia Historical Archaeology

The field school in Charlottesville has been an amazing experience in multiple ways. All archaeological projects that I have been involved with before this one have been mostly focused on ancient Brazilian pottery, especially from the Amazon region.

I came to join the W&L spring dig with a great expectation about the methods and techniques applied in the field in a different country, and I have been learning a lot. Even more than that, I am developing an interest in a new archaeological area – Historical Archaeology – which I had not encountered before.

Digging a historical site in Virginia is different than digging a pre historical site in Brazil, but the principles are the same in both places and I found it pretty familiar around here. The way that we string the units, get the elevations and make meticulous records describing everything that happens in each context are pretty much the same. The way that we built carefully straight profiles, paid attention to every change in the soil (like color and texture changes), and look for features are also similar. However, in my country, we don’t use the shovels that I enjoyed learning how to use (they’re so practical!). We also usually dig in artificial 10-cm levels in the Amazon, while here we are following the three natural layers of this particular area (topsoil, plow zone and subsoil, respectively).

Also, the artifacts that we are finding here are completely different. We found buttons; nails; table, window and bottle glass; beads; pipe stems; burned bones; refined earthenware and stoneware that made us pretty excited, even if we did not find any house structure yet (we still have a few more days and we are keeping our hopes up).

1. pipe stem, button and bead
2. window glass
3. wine bottle glass
4. window glass
5. utilitarian stoneware
6. table stoneware
7. creamware
8. pearlware
9. shelledge blue pearlware
10. shelledge green pearlware
11. polychrome pearlware
12. nails
13. phyllite

I’m very glad that I could come and see how people are doing archaeology around here and at this point of field work I have made not only new colleagues, but also a lot of good friends. I hope I can dig with the Washington & Lee crew again someday (maybe in Brazil, who knows).

Plow Scars and People

In the past weeks we’ve focused more on the items found and the methods used in order to find them. But, what’s the bigger picture? While we know the brief history of this site, the excavations here will, in the future give us a better story. So far, we are aware that this land, when owned by William Short, was used as an experiment. William Short was against slavery, so his dream for Morven was to prove that white tenant farmers’ work, and not that of slaves could run America. At site D, we are attempting to find the home of George Haden, one of the tenant farmers whose home was mapped there.

Long after the time of George Haden, Morven farm was owned by the Kluge family and used as a stud farm. When the Kluge’s owned the farm, the field at site D was plowed for years. The years of plowing churns up the soil and therefore the artifacts in it, creating the thick artifact-rich layer we call the plow zone layer.

The plowing displaces the artifacts in a vertical manner allowing for multiple years of artifacts to be in the same stratigraphic layer. This creates an artifact and stone rich layer that can be multiple tenths of a foot deep. While we know of the plowing from the appearance of most of our second contexts, the first solid evidence of plowing was unearthed this week in unit 28. We found two plow scars in the Eastern side.

A plow scar is a feature left by the uneven movement of the plow through the top and sub soils. The plow scars were excavated separately from the other contexts, but no artifacts were found in them. However, while they lacked artifacts, the fact that we had plow scars means we were correct in our assumptions of post-Haden-era plowing. While we haven’t found any domestic features yet, it will be interesting to see if anything pops up in the final week. Perhaps units 29 and 37 will provide us with something!

-Caroline Huber ’12

Archaeology, History, and Technology at Site D

The Archaeology of Site D at Morven Farm has turned up artifacts and features in the ground that indicate where things once existed and where to dig next. Lately at the site because of indications of plow scars and another rocky feature digging has progressed in units adjacent to already excavated units. These further excavations are to investigate as fully as possible any features, or changes and discoloration in the soil from its natural color and consistency. Previous archaeology in the general area of Site D by an archaeological company is also helps this field school look at where we are digging now. The distribution maps of specific categories of artifacts from the companies findings has helped us to make sense of the patterns of artifacts that we are finding. While digging these past few weeks I have thought of digging to investigate features and the placement of artifacts in a unit as way to test a hypothesis. And usually with the more digging that goes on the better the information we have about the site gets and the more accurate and interesting the hypothesis can get. While units are random across a site each one is used to test the archaeological hypothesis that those coordinates maybe significant to the site and its history.

In regards to the history of the site we know that there have been different phases of habitation and usage for the terrain of Site D. Thanks to a wonderful Power Point presentation by Laura Voisin George, the director of research at Morven Farm, our field school knows a lot about the history of the occupation of Morven Farm. Before the arrival of European people there may have been Native Americans living in the area of Morven Farm. That land is also referred to as Indian Camp, and in excavations that took place back behind Dick’s Branch stream across from where we are working there is possible evidence for a Native American encampment on the land.  The land was first held by a European as an estate inherited by Edward Carter and had its three original for life tenant farming families in the Price family among others by 1791. In 1795 Thomas Jefferson bought the land we now know as Morven Farm for his friend William Short who somehow had the audacity to not use this gift as a place to live to be Thomas Jefferson’s neighbor (yes, we drive past Monticello every day to get to site) but instead turned it into a tenant farm.  Depending on a lot of factors including why you were a tenant farmer (if you were working off the debt of a passage to the New World, if you were just trying to make a beginning for you and your family, or if you were somewhere in between), your experience as a tenant farmer could be very different. The earlier tenant farmers of Morven Farm are identified by maps with their family name written presumably in the places that they are occupying and from 1795 to 1810 there are ten of them. A letter from the year 1800 shows the names Terrill, Cornelius, still the Prices, and Haden as tenants of Morven Farm and the Giannini’s (Anthony Giannini was Jefferson’s gardener) as their neighbor. There is genealogical uncertainty and probability that the Haden’s that appear at Morven Farm are related to the Haden’s that appear in records in and around Albemarle County. We know of some of the marriage between neighbors on Morven Farm and we know that the Morven Farm Haden’s moved to Alabama roughly around 1820 and that the Terrill’s moved to Kentucky by about 1806. The land changed hands in 1813 when David Higginbotham bought the land, his main house was built by 1820, and the land became a plantation. Since then the land has acquired a Historic Garden and is now owned by the University of Virginia. The work that the field school at Site D is trying to do is to help uncover the importance of the tenant farmers’ of Morven Farm and what their experiences must have been like. Being able to know more about them than their names and who they married is a valuable part of history, the little guy’s story can be just as important and interesting as a man like Thomas Jefferson’s and our histories are biased and incomplete if we do not at least attempt to understand how everyone in a society lived. Basically, what I am saying is that of course the tenant farmers lives are interesting and important to study.

One other way that we can get at learning about a site is analyzing and cataloguing its artifacts. Usually lab work occurs off site and can take a considerable amount of time to come up with solidly interpretable results. With the help of the X-Ray Florescence Spectrometer (XRF) that Dr. Uffelman kindly brought out to Site D the field school was able to analyze the elemental compositions of artifacts within minutes. This information can be helpful in dating a site which we can couple with the knowledge of knowing who and when they lived on Morven Farm to know even more about the site. One example of chemicals that can be used for dating an artifact is the elements used to color the glazes on ceramics: copper would be an authentic green colorant while a more modern green coloring uses a different element. It was fascinating to find traces of arsenic in a piece of tableware glass, I wonder how much of it could leech from the glass and who got served from that vessel… Some people call lab work boring but in reality it is essential to the process and one of the only times when a person can really get a chance to sit down with all of the new information that the artifacts bring and really think about what they may reveal about a site.

Combining all of our sources of information, from archaeological discoveries, historical records, and laboratory analysis, to create as lucid and extensive a picture as possible about the lives of every person that lived at Morven Farm is significant work. It is so that each name on the list of tenants is not just a combination of letters and not just a credit to the wealthy and powerful men of society. Everyone has a story and everyone deserves to have that story told. And with that said I can’t wait to get back to digging because that is where all of the discovery comes from!

-Victoria Cervantes ’14