Associated Products
Considering Landscape as Material Culture: An Example from Eighteenth-Century Piedmont Virginia. (Article)Title: Considering Landscape as Material Culture: An Example from Eighteenth-Century Piedmont Virginia.
Author: Ptacek, Crystal
Abstract: In 1730, Francis Eppes patented 2,400 acres of land located in Virginia’s eastern piedmont. The neighborhood which developed surrounding this historic Indian Camp plantation helps provide an interpretation about past identity formation and power dynamics. Using public records and ArcGIS, I locate this historical community and explore the complex networks of these individuals. Historic land patents and deeds surrounding the Indian Camp property were given a spatial quality, and based on resulting maps, research has identified a dynamic community. Through the 1720s and 1730s, powerful, influential men with existing social, political, and economic connections in the tidewater were establishing themselves as piedmont neighbors whose plantations increased their wealth. Relying on material culture analysis, my study supports previous Chesapeake scholarship in that it shows how a particular neighborhood’s influential citizens helped create a Virginia identity and how greatly land contributed to that identity.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://www.siftings.com/JMAA_PDFs.htmAccess Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Middle Atlantic Archaeology 29:55-72.
Publisher: Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference
Assessing Variability among Quartering Sites in Virginia (Article)Title: Assessing Variability among Quartering Sites in Virginia
Author: Eleanor E. Breen
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: The definition of what constitutes a Virginia slave quarter based on archaeological evidence is evolving. In the 1970s and 1980s, archaeologists developed an informal set of criteria that equated subfloor pits and the presence of “Africanisms” with structures occupied by enslaved people, and these criteria are still widely used. The accumulation of an archaeological and architectural data set of more than 170 Virginian quartering sites over the past 40 years has demonstrated that these sites vary across time and space, has underscored the problematic nature of site definition based on a checklist approach to ethnic or racial criteria, and has highlighted the challenges of inter-site comparison. We compare three quarters dating to the Revolutionary ware and post-Revolutionary periods. Our comparison underscores significant differences, as well as similarities, that existed between them and raises analytical challenges. Understanding variability and exploring alternative methods for site interpretation are important goals for the future. Employing analyses such as minimum vessel counts, assessments of richness, and abundance indices for artifacts, along with soil chemistry, ethnobotanical data and landscape organization to understand historical landscapes may prove to be more reliable methods of identifying quarters than relying on the presence or absence of certain features or artifact types.
Year: 2012
Primary URL:
http://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/neha/Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Northeast Historical Archaeology
Publisher: Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology
Slave Housing, Household Formation and Community Dynamics at Poplar Forest, 1760s-1810s. (Book Section)Title: Slave Housing, Household Formation and Community Dynamics at Poplar Forest, 1760s-1810s.
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Editor: Jack Gary
Editor: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: This research illuminates the development and maturation of slavery in the Virginia piedmont in the period during and just after the Revolutionary War. The author reviews the evidence of slave dwellings and domestic landscapes at Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest plantation and their relationship to household and community formation from the late 1760s to the early 1810s, responding to models proposed by other archaeologists.
Year: 2012
Primary URL:
http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.utk.edu:90/lib/utennk/detail.action?docID=10574911Access Model: subscription only
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Book Title: Jefferson's Poplar Forest, Unearthing a Virginia Plantation.
ISBN: 8130-3988-6
Archaeological Excavations at Wingos Quarter (44BE0298) Forest, Virginia. Results from the 2000-2012 Seasons (Report)Title: Archaeological Excavations at Wingos Quarter (44BE0298) Forest, Virginia. Results from the 2000-2012 Seasons
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Author: Eleanor E. Breen
Author: Andrew Wilkins
Author: Crystal Ptacek
Abstract: Excavations at Wingo’s began as part of a larger study of slavery at Poplar Forest, a late 18th-century piedmont Virginia plantation. Archaeological excavations at Poplar Forest preceded the Wingo’s project includes work at the Quarter and North Hill quarters; within and around a standing brick house that served as a late antebellum slave quarter; and within a group of dependencies associated with the early 19th-century mansion built for Thomas Jefferson’s retirement. Additional excavations southeast of the mansion in areas known as Sites A and B have subsequently provided additional information about slavery on the property.
Work at Wingo’s began with small-scale testing in 2000 and 2001. From 2007 to 2012, more intensive research was undertaken at the site, with funding from the National Foundation for the Humanities from 2010 to 2012. Research focused on the creation and maintenance of domestic spaces by the enslaved; practices relating to foodways; and the ways in which enslaved people engaged with the informal and formal consumer economies. In order to address the materiality of slavery, the research team adopted a multi-scalar approach that captured information useful for reconstructing macro-features such as yards, more limited features such as subfloor pits, and the micro-scale evidence of burned seeds, wood charcoal, small faunal remains, and artifacts vital for addressing foodways and economic practices. This report presents a detailed summary and interpretations of research findings.
Date: 12/30/2015
Primary URL:
http://web.utk.edu/~bheath2/#Access Model: open access
Engaging the Piedmont, Transitions in Virginia Slavery (Web Resource)Title: Engaging the Piedmont, Transitions in Virginia Slavery
Author: Mark A. Freeman
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: The project website includes site histories, a project blog, educational modules, project-related images and reports.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://web.utk.edu/~bheath2/#Land and Community - An Interactive Educational Module (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Land and Community - An Interactive Educational Module
Author: Mark A. Freeman
Abstract: An important component of the “Engaging the Piedmont: Transitions in Virginia Slavery 1730-1790” project is public outreach. The project website seeks to inform both a professional and wider audience through papers, images, blogs and specific content aimed at K-12 and teachers.
The first educational piece is an interactive module, aimed at grades 10-12. It allows students to look at land patterns through an exhaustive study of patents. Students will engage with maps, and related primary documents, showing changing land ownership from 1710 through 1770. They will be asked to consider how rivers and roads affected development, and to consider the effect of land fragmentation and family ownership on the building of community, for both the land owners and their enslaved workers.
Date: 03/23/2012
Conference Name: Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference
The Domestic Landscape of the Wingos Quarter (44BE298), Bedford County, Virginia. (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Domestic Landscape of the Wingos Quarter (44BE298), Bedford County, Virginia.
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: Interest in the landscapes of slavery has grown over the past 20 years. Archaeologists have combined evidence from macro- and micro-scale approaches to landscape that includes analyses of the social, economic, and environmental factors governing planters' decisions about the siting of quarters as well as the use of space by enslaved residents. Central to this research are the questions of how enslaved people structured non-architectural spaces, what activities they undertook within them, and how domestic landscapes served them as community spaces, centers of economic production, and places of resistance. At Poplar Forest, archaeologists have been exploring the landscapes of slave quarters dating from the American Revolution to the late antebellum period. In this paper, I use features, individual artifacts, artifact distributions, and soil chemistry to examine the structure and use of the domestic landscape of the Wingos quarter, a late-eighteenth century site on the periphery of the Poplar Forest plantation.
Date: 03/23/2012
Conference Name: Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference
Rediscovering the Landscapes of Wingos and Indian Camp: An Archaeological Perspective. (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Rediscovering the Landscapes of Wingos and Indian Camp: An Archaeological Perspective.
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: This paper discusses methodologies for tracing the development of domestic and work spaces associated with enslaved people at Poplar Forest and Indian Camp, two plantations located in the Virginia piedmont. The rediscovery of these ephemeral landscapes has been accomplished through a multilayered approach to diverse types of evidence including soil chemistry, artifact distributions, ethnobotanical remains, features, remote sensing and the documentary record. Together, these sources reveal aspects of the layout and function of spaces on plantation peripheries, such as the Wingos Quarter at Poplar Forest, and help to document landscapes that many scholars do not commonly associate with plantations, such as the tavern-store-plantation complex that developed at Indian Camp in the early 19th-century.
Date: 01/10/2015
Conference Name: 48th Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology
The Changing Landscape of Indian Camp. (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Changing Landscape of Indian Camp.
Author: Meagan Dennison
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Author: J. Hope Smith
Author: Crystal Ptacek
Abstract: Indian Camp, a plantation in the eastern Virginia piedmont, served as an outlying quarter farm for tobacco cultivation from 1730 to the 1790s. Just prior to 1800, an ordinary and retail store were built there and continued in operation into the 1840s. Since 2011, archaeologists working on the property, now known as French’s Tavern, have concentrated efforts in a field west of the surviving historic structures. The site contains a complex array of post holes, pits, piers and other features, evidence of a dynamic landscape that took shape in the final quarter of the eighteenth century and was reconfigured throughout the antebellum period. This paper reviews the archaeological evidence uncovered to date and considers the roles of ordinaries and stores as important places of exchange for both free and enslaved piedmont residents, allowing rural people to cross plantation boundaries and participate, to some extent, in wider social and economic networks.
Date: 01/09/2014
Conference Name: 47th Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology
New Research at Indian Camp Plantation (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: New Research at Indian Camp Plantation
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: Indian Camp was a 1200-acre plantation in the eastern piedmont of Virginia. Owned by the Eppes, Wayles and Jefferson families from the 1730s to the 1770s, the land was subdivided by the late 18th century. Archaeologists from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have surveyed portions of the property looking for slave quarters. This paper will summarize findings to date, including the discoveries of two structures and an assemblage of artifacts dating from the third quarter of the 18th through the mid-19th centuries.
Date: 03/08/2013
Conference Name: Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference
The Domestic Landscape of the Wingos Quarter (44BE0298), Bedford County, Virginia (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Domestic Landscape of the Wingos Quarter (44BE0298), Bedford County, Virginia
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: Interest in the landscapes of slavery has grown over the past 20 years. Archaeologists have combined evidence from macro- and micro-scale approaches to landscape that includes analyses of the social, economic, and environmental factors governing planters' decisions about the siting of quarters as well as the use of space by enslaved residents. Central to this research are the questions of how enslaved people structured non-architectural spaces, what activities they undertook within them, and how domestic landscapes served them as community spaces, centers of economic production, and places of resistance. At Poplar Forest, archaeologists have been exploring the landscapes of slave quarters dating from the American Revolution to the late antebellum period. In this paper, I use features, individual artifacts, artifact distributions, and soil chemistry to examine the structure and use of the domestic landscape of the Wingos quarter, a late eighteenth-century site on the periphery of the Poplar Forest plantation.
Date: 03/24/2012
Conference Name: 42nd Annual Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference
Slave Housing, Household Formation and Community Dynamics at Poplar Forest (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Slave Housing, Household Formation and Community Dynamics at Poplar Forest
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: This paper combines archaeological data from three slave quarters at Poplar Forest, a piedmont Virginia plantation owned by Thomas Jefferson from 1774-1826, with historical data on the demographic structure of the enslaved community who lived there, to test recent models that attribute changes in house size and subfloor pit frequencies in Chesapeake quarters over time to family development or to the transition from tobacco- to wheat-based systems of agricultural production.
Date: 04/19/2012
Conference Name: 77th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology
“Where’s What at Wingo’s? Artifact and Soil Chemical Distributions at Wingo’s Quarter Site, Bedford County, Virginia.” (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “Where’s What at Wingo’s? Artifact and Soil Chemical Distributions at Wingo’s Quarter Site, Bedford County, Virginia.”
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Author: Andrew Wilkins
Author: Crystal Ptacek
Abstract: Recent investigations at Wingo’s Quarter Site compose part of a project investigating slave community formation and its material and social worlds in Virginia’s Piedmont during the 18th century. Wingo’s is part of Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Bedford County, Virginia. The site was occupied 1773-1790s as a residence of enslaved African Americans and their overseer. Structural features at Wingo’s are limited to two sub-floor pits, likely representing one slave structure. This lack of structural evidence leaves questions about site composition, organization, and activities unanswered. Plowzone artifact and soil chemical distributions serve as a principal means for reconstructing the 18th-century landscape.
Date: 04/19/2012
Conference Name: 77th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology
Engaging the Piedmont: Examining Regional Variability among Eighteenth-Century Quartering Sites in Virginia (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Engaging the Piedmont: Examining Regional Variability among Eighteenth-Century Quartering Sites in Virginia
Author: Lori A. Lee
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: While archaeologists are increasingly studying sites associated with enslavement in the Virginia piedmont, the preponderance of work has been carried out at Tidewater sites. Historical evidence suggests significant differences in demography, in the timing of agricultural transitions from tobacco to grain-based economies, and in access to consumer goods between the two regions which have not been critically evaluated. This paper focuses on two late eighteenth-century piedmont sites from the Poplar Forest plantation, to explore internal variability and to begin to examine how regional differences might be visible archaeologically.
Date: 01/06/2012
Conference Name: 45th Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology
Assessing Variability Between Quartering Sites in Revolutionary-Era Virginia (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Assessing Variability Between Quartering Sites in Revolutionary-Era Virginia
Author: Eleanor E. Breen
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Abstract: Archaeologists have struggled to define slave quartering sites, basing their interpretations on the material evidence of houses, landscapes and more portable objects. Since the 1960s, researchers have considered "Africanisms," assemblage patterning and predictive geographic models to answer the question: what defines a slave quarter archaeologically? The accumulation of an archaeological dataset of over 100 quartering sites in Virginia over the past 40 years has demonstrated that these sites are highly variable across time and space and has underscored the problematic nature of site definition. This paper examines three Virginia quartering sites dating to the Revolutionary War period. The observed similarities and differences between them likely resulted from a combination of historical circumstances, shared processes of racialization, poverty and regional variation in the institution of slavery. What tools might we use to help tease these factors apart and examine their effects more closely?
Date: 01/07/2011
Conference Name: 44th Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology.
Reconstructing Mr. Eppes' Neighborhood: A GIS Analysis of the Dynamics of Power (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Reconstructing Mr. Eppes' Neighborhood: A GIS Analysis of the Dynamics of Power
Author: Crystal Ptacek
Abstract: While neighborhoods are dynamic entities, their past interactions may be partially reconstructed through documentary analysis. Historical research relating to the Indian Camp property in modern Powhatan County, Virginia has enabled archaeologists to track social and economic relationships in the area from 1730 to 1825. Plotting these relationships spatially in ArcGIS 10 has clarified historic dynamics of power and inequality through land and slave ownership and kinship networks. By examining a landscape over a 100-year span using ArcGIS, names and people become part of a dynamic social and economic network, spaces become places, and a diachronic history of a neighborhood emerges.
Date: 04/19/2012
Conference Name: 77th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology
Understanding Foodways under Jefferson:Paleoethnobotany at the Wingo's Site (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Understanding Foodways under Jefferson:Paleoethnobotany at the Wingo's Site
Author: Heather Trigg
Author: Samantha Henderson
Abstract: This paper will focus on botanical remains from the Wingo's site, a quarter most likely occupied in the late 18th century when Jefferson was managing his Poplar Forest properties from afar. Using macrobotanical remains can allow archaeologists to understand the diverse nature of enslaved foodways as well as the slaves' impact on and interaction with the environment around them.
Date: 04/19/2012
Conference Name: 77th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology
Wingo's data set (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)Title: Wingo's data set
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Author: Jillian A. Galle
Author: Leslie Cooper
Author: Linsey Bates
Author: Elizabeth Bollwerk
Author: Ileana Ilas
Abstract: These data are part of a broader archive of archaeological data pertaining to New World slavery. The Wingo's data set consists of a narrative overview of the project, pages about site features, site chronology, images for the site and a bibliography, as well as artifact and context data that can be queried.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://www.daacs.orgPrimary URL Description: Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery
Access Model: open access
Exploring the Landscape for Food at Wingo's (Game/Simulation)Title: Exploring the Landscape for Food at Wingo's
Author: Mark A. Freeman
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Author: Eric G. Schweickart
Abstract: This web-based game challenges students to collect food for three meals from the Wingo's quarter and surrounding landscape, using faunal and floral data from the site. Students visit field edges, woods, plantation fields, a garden, and hen house, go fishing, visit the store, and receive provisions in order to collect enough food to feed themselves and their families. Obstacles abound.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://web.utk.edu/~bheath2Primary URL Description: Follow the link to Education, Bones and Seeds, and Exploring the Food Landscape
Access Model: open access
Programming Language/Platform: javascript
Source Available?: Yes