An archaeological site doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it’s part of a larger landscape. That landscape may include a farmhouse and the surrounding farm buildings and fields, or the larger rural community that the farm was a part of. In a town it includes the houses, businesses, public buildings (schools, etc.) and spaces (such as public squares or parks). What we as the archaeologists excavate and study is generally only a small slice of the larger universe that the site was part of. Regardless of how much of a site we excavate, whether a small sample around the house and yard, or a bigger slice of several town lots, we always have to keep in mind that the site is part of something bigger.
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An old tenant house and the surrounding archaeological site were once part of a community of dozens of tenant houses all located within a mile or so of one another. They were part of larger farms, some owner occupied, others not. All of these places were connected by dirt roads that led to the nearest village with its churches, stores, and school. This tenant house was not an isolated entity. |
Over
the past year, when we weren’t busy at the Swan House site, the CCASM volunteers and
I have spent some time out along the Patuxent River near Benedict doing
pedestrian walkovers of selected areas along the river. The work was funded in
part by a grant from the Maryland Heritage Authority. We’re part of the new
Southern Maryland National Heritage Area! Last year we concentrated our efforts
on an area of about 200 acres that includes shore line, rolling agricultural
fields, and wooded uplands. In the process we’ve located ten new sites from
different time periods. That’s the thing about a large landscape study, people
have been living in Maryland since at least the end of the last Ice Age over
12,000 years ago. That’s a lot of time for people to set up camps, villages,
farms, towns, roads, and so on across the area. Sometimes the sites are on top
of older sites so you get a palimpsest of occupations.
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An agricultural field in our survey universe. A farm road crossed the field in the 20th century. Enslaved men and women labored here in the 18th and 19th centuries and tenant farms continued to work the land after the Civil War. And, there were Native Americans living here 1000s of years ago. |
One
of the things we enjoyed doing on a hot summer day was walking along the
shoreline of the river and creeks looking for sites along the banks and in the
shallow water. We located a few Native American sites, primarily small shell
midden sites of unknown date. Midden is the word archaeologists use to describe
refuse or garbage areas. These aren’t the living quarters, but were the areas
where people cleaned fish and opened oysters for the cooking pots. You really
don’t want a lot of smelly fish guts and sharp oyster shells next to the area
where you’re sleeping, so these were near, but not in the camp or village.
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Linda during part of the shoreline survey |
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An shallow STP with a shell concentration at the base |
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Carol and Peggy working on an STP These are especially good in areas where there is no surface visability |
STPs
also enable us to retrieve artifacts from a location. Theoretically by mapping
out the pattern of STPs that have artifacts, as opposed to those that don’t, we
can locate the edges of the site. I say theoretically because it all depends on
the spacing between the STPs. If you dig a STP every 50 feet, you might get a
different result than those placed at 20 feet. But overall, it does give you an
idea of how big the site is and where the concentrations of artifacts are.
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Denise and Elsie working on a STP |
At
the mansion we found a layer of oyster shells that turned out to be a former
drive into the property – it was identified as such by Peter Swann, who lived
in the house when he was a child. Unfortunately we didn’t find any intact
deposits associated with George Maxwell and his family or with the enslaved
people who lived and worked there during the 18th and 19th centuries. We plan
to broaden our search at the mansion house next spring.
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Shell driveway at Maxwel Hall Mansion |
In another part of the survey universe we found two sunken roads. A sunken road is one that has worn a trench into the landscape due to decades of wagon traffic. They often appear on inclines where the wear and tear of horses, wagons, carts, and later early automobiles, caused the soil to erode down the slope. One of the two roads we found may have been used by the British during the War of 1812 when they marched on Washington, D.C. This road runs from my friend Franklin’s farm, up a high ridge and joins the main road toward Washington.
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Cathy Thompson by the sunken road |
For those of you who don’t know the story, the British made life in Benedict hellish during the summer of 1814. They raided the town on June 15th and stole tobacco from the warehouse. They tried to raid the town again on the 21st, but by that time the Maryland militia had arrived and they were driven off but not before they had done substantial damage to the town. An account in the Pennsylvania Gazette on June 29th noted that “Scarcely a building escaped without injury.”
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The possible location of the road in 1814 James Wilkinson, 1816 Map of Maj. Gen. Ross's route with the British column from Benedict on the Patuxent River to the city of Washington August 1814 Library of Congress |
Then, on 20 August, the British returned and landed British troops at Benedict and camped on Clement Dorsey’s farm. From Benedict, the British marched overland to Washington, D.C. They engaged the American forces at Bladensburg on 24 August, a battle that was not our finest hour. The retreat of the Americans from Bladensburg was called the “Bladensburg Races” because our forces basically ran for it. The Brits continued on to Washington, set the White House and Capitol on fire, as well as some other public buildings and bridges. The Americans set the Navy Yards along the Anacostia River on fire to prevent the British from taking a couple of ships on the ways that were ready to be launched. After wreaking havoc on Washington, the British returned to Benedict, boarded their ships and left.
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Washington Burning in 1814 Paul M. Rapin de Thoyras 1816 Illustration from The History of England from the Earliest Periods, Volume 1 |
As
we move forward in time, at least three of the sites we found are associated
with tenants who lived on the land after the Civil War. Two of them are
represented by poured concrete foundations. We’ve mapped the foundations of one
building and will be returning to map the other set when the vegetation dies
back.
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Mary, Denise, and Elsie taking measurements at one of the tenant houses |
This
month, we spent a few days at a shell midden site and placed 31 STPs across the
site at 20-foot intervals. We were able to trace the midden location and then
found a scattering of artifacts that overlaps with the edge of another
site set back from the river. We located the latter last
fall and need to do a surface collection once the soybeans are harvested.
However, preliminary results suggest that the shell midden dates to at least
the Middle Woodland Period, or about A.D. 200 through 950. We just finished the
STPs and have a lot of shell and other artifacts to clean and catalog.
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Ned, Denise, and Linda working at a shell midden site |
I’ll
post more about the landscape study as we continue our survey work. Over the
next couple of months we’ll be back and forth between the Patuxent River
survey, finishing up loose ends at the Swann Site in Port Tobacco, and of
course in the Port Tobacco lab cleaning artifacts. And, we are looking for some
volunteers! So let me know if you’re interested in joining us.
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