Recent blog with
the Fairfield Foundation:
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Aerial view of Gloucester Point VIMS campus, with burial
locations indicated
What
happens to archaeological collections and associated documentation when the dig
is over? Two weeks ago, fellow Colleen Betti wrote about her analysis of
collections from the large slave quarter yards and midden at Fairfield
(click here to
read Colleen’s blog). Colleen’s research will culminate in a senior honor’s
thesis at the College of William and Mary, which will be available to future
researchers through Swem library. In a similar way, salvage and contract
archaeology often concludes with a comprehensive technical report. In Virginia,
these reports are available in the Department of Historical Resources (DHR)
archives in Richmond. Archaeologists planning new field projects consult these
site reports in order to get a glimpse of what other researchers learned and
perhaps what they can expect from excavations. But what happens when numerous
organizations and contract firms have excavated in the same area? It becomes
much more difficult to piece together the history of a place and its residents
unless all the various research has been synthesized.
Over
the past year and a half, I have been working with the Fairfield Foundation to
research the history and archaeology of Gloucester Point. In particular, we are
interested in Gloucester Town, a thriving colonial port located on the York
River and the present-day site of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science
(VIMS). Gloucester Town’s history of archaeological excavation extends back
decades, primarily spurred by the expansion of the VIMS campus. These efforts
led the placement of the Gloucester Point Archaeological District on the
National Register of Historic Places in 1985. As a colonial port town, it has
great comparative potential with sites like Colchester, recently
excavated by Fairfax County archaeologists, and Yorktown, just across the
river. Our goal is to add to the extensive body of research on Gloucester
Point, writing “biographies” of Gloucester Town residents,
overlaying historic plat maps on the landscape, and relocating
previously-excavated archaeological features using GIS.
The
high density of human burials is an endemic problem for archaeologists at
Gloucester Point. While some contract firms elected to shift construction in
order to preserve burials in situ, other firms fully excavated human remains,
taking advantage of their research potential. Between 1983 and 2005, more than
thirty burials were uncovered within the confines of historic Gloucester Town.
My goal? Map each burial location – whether or not an individual is still
interred on that site – in order to preserve extant human burials and determine
known burial areas. The challenge? Mapping technology in the 1980s and 90s
doesn’t come close to what we use today. I scanned site maps from the DHR,
geo-referencing them (transforming them to a known coordinate system using a
set of control points) in ArcGIS. I then digitized burial features, entering
reference data in an associated table. The result? A clean map of burial
locations on the VIMS campus, indicating key areas of historic burial
concentrations. In particular, I note an area where seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Gloucester Town inhabitants were interred, a Revolutionary
War era cemetery associated with Cornwallis’ siege of Yorktown and Gloucester
Town, and a nineteenth-century burying ground postdating Gloucester Town.
Beyond
these goals, I have been researching the mortuary contexts and skeletal biology
of individuals interred at Gloucester Point, contextualizing data using social
history – a research model I take from Julie King and Douglas Ubelaker’s report at
Patuxent Point, Maryland. I hope that this research – and the
contributions of other Fairfield Foundation staff and volunteers – will add to
the rich history of Gloucester and the Chesapeake region.
