Servant bells, also called house bells, are systems of wire and pulleys that run throughout a building and allow a resident to call for a servant from the far reaches […]

by Caitlyn Johnson, Summer Research Intern Monday June 6 marked the start of the 2016 Poplar Forest Archaeology Field School. This year’s field work focuses on what is possibly a slave […]

By Logan Barger June 20th began the third week of archaeology field school at Poplar Forest, in which students gained an introduction into the field of Landscape and Environmental archaeology.  […]

By Lesley Jennings This week the field school students learned about the importance of public archaeology and the interaction between archaeologists and the public. Public archaeology uses various methods to […]

By Ryan McDowell Six weeks, gone by in a blink of an eye, but time is strange like that.  Logically, standing outside in the hot sun all day, digging up […]

Anthropomorphic clay tobacco pipes, also sometimes called figural pipes or face pipes, were a popular type of commemorative souvenir in the nineteenth century. Pipe manufacturers often made pipes depicting the […]

By Sara Griggs and Ashley Pickard This week we field students opened Sites A and B; they are potential slave quarter sites with a possible sub-floor pit.

By: Kendell Porter and Andrea Zona Though Monday morning started off rainy, we were able to get out into the field every day this week. We were all very excited […]

It’s time to admit a difficult truth…archaeologists are not perfect. We are not omniscient and the artifacts we recover during excavation are sometimes misidentified. One of the many reasons why […]

Imagine that you have a small mountain of puzzle pieces in front of you of all shapes, sizes, and colors. You don’t know how many puzzles are represented by the […]

Why is our teapot spinning?!

In August of 1822, Reverend S.A. Bumstead of Maryland was traveling in the Charlottesville area and happened to see Thomas Jefferson out for a ride. According to the Reverend: “He […]