READING JEFFERSON’S LANDSCAPE

By David Malakoff

AT first glance, it might not seem like much for archaeologists to work with. There are microscopic grains of pollen that wafted from pine and oak trees more than 200 years ago and became buried at the bottom of a muddy stream. Some bricks and patches of discolored sediment that mark the locations of earthen pits that once sat hidden beneath the floorboards of slave quarters. Handfuls of ceramic sherds and rusty nails, some broken or bent. One half of a shattered porcelain plate discovered a half-mile from its mate.

These humble finds, however, are helping archaeologists reveal a tale of profound social, economic, and ecological upheaval at the home of one of America’s most famous founding fathers. Over the past few decades, researchers working at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s iconic home in central Virginia, have acquired a clearer understanding of how the sprawling plantation evolved during the life of the remarkable man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, served as the nation’s third president, and founded the University of Virginia.

Painstaking fieldwork—including the systematic digging of over 20,000 shovel test pits—has yielded new insights into how Jefferson ran his plantation, treated the approximately 600 enslaved people he owned during his lifetime, and reacted to the dramatic economic and political changes in Europe and North America in the late 1700s and early 1800s. This past summer, researchers helped document important spaces linked to Jefferson’s elegant brick mansion, including a room used by Sally Hemings, the enslaved African-American who historians believe gave birth to six of Jefferson’s children, as well as an elaborate brick stove used by Hemings’ brothers to prepare the French cuisine Jefferson savored.

Together, the discoveries “are helping us put life at Monticello during Jefferson’s time into a broader perspective, especially for the enslaved people who lived here and made up most of the population,” said Fraser Neiman, who since 1995 has led archaeological research for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello. “We see that there was a lot of change—in how the landscape looked, in how

Archaeologists excavate a maze of twentieth-century pipe trenches and late nineteenth-century planting beds adjacent to Monticello’s South Pavilion.

The removal of a bathroom from the cellar of the South Pavilion allowed archaeologists to explore Jefferson-era deposits under a twentieth-century concrete floor.

people worked, in how they lived. And we’re getting a better feel for how those changes are related to what’s going on in the larger Atlantic world, including Europe.”

IT is likely that the digs occurring these days at Monticello would have fascinated Jefferson, a prodigious polymath whose scholarly interests included archaeology. (He once excavated a Native American mound on his property.) He inherited most of Monticello’s 5,000 acres of forested, hilly land along the Rivanna River from his father, who died when Jefferson was fourteen. In 1768, at the age of twenty-six, he began planning and then building his home atop one of the property’s highest summits; Monticello means “little mountain” in Italian. It would take forty years for the house we know today to emerge, and archaeology reveals that even at Jefferson’s death in 1826, the steps to the West Portico were still a work in progress.

But long before that, Monticello became a bustling plantation, occupied at any one time by members of Jefferson’s family, about 120 slaves, and numerous indentured servants and hired hands. Like many other colonial planters, Jefferson focused on growing tobacco and selling it to England. But the tobacco trade withered in the late 1700s as a result of the Revolutionary War and increasing competition from foreign growers. Luckily, a lucrative new agricultural market emerged: exporting wheat to Europe, where demand for American grain was strong thanks to a growing population and chronic warfare that depressed local harvests. In 1790, Jefferson moved to cash in on the boom by sowing his first wheat crop. Soon, tobacco was mostly an afterthought.

That shift from tobacco to wheat had far-reaching effects on Monticello’s landscape and enslaved workers, archaeologists have found. One big change was increased deforestation and erosion: while tobacco could thrive in holes dug in small clearings in forests called swiddens, wheat required bigger expanses of flatter, cleared land that could be plowed. Researchers have detected telltale signs of that dramatic shift in land use in cores of sediment extracted from the mud that long ago piled up behind several stone walls that Jefferson had built to keep eroding dirt from burying small streams that were important drinking water sources.

When researchers analyze pollen grains trapped in the sediments, they find that tree pollen predominates in the older, deeper layers. That is consistent with Monticello’s tobacco-growing era, which didn’t require complete deforestation to grow the crop. But in the younger layers of sediment, tree pollen becomes rarer and pollen from asters and other open-field plants dominates, signaling the shift to

A sample of artifacts from Site 8, a domestic area that was home to enslaved field laborers in the late eighteenth century. (From left) A European wine bottle neck, three ceramic sherds, a bone-handled fork, a bone toothbrush, three men’s clothing buttons. (Bottom) An imported English clay tobacco pipe.

treeless wheat fields. The sediment cores, which can be fivefeet long, also show signs of increased topsoil and eventually subsoil erosion after the tobacco-to-wheat transition. “Which is what you’d expect as you take more trees off the landscape and start plowing,” said Neiman.

The shift to wheat also triggered noticeable changes in how Monticello’s slaves lived. Under the tobacco swidden system, Jefferson and other growers typically divided their lands into so-called quarter farms, each with its own overseer and group of enslaved workers, who lived near the crop. At Monticello, archaeologists have found evidence of one such labor settlement, which was occupied from roughly 1770 to 1800. It sat about a half-mile east of the main house on now-forested plots known as Sites 7 and 8.

At Site 7, discoveries such as bricks, rusty nails, sherds of pricier imported pottery, coins, buttons, and other higherquality household objects indicate that an overseer occupied a small house there. Nearby at Site 8, a mix of imported and locally-made pottery suggests two slave settlements sat adjacent to the overseer’s house.

By the early 1800s, however, both the overseer and the slaves had abandoned that relatively flat area—which was ultimately converted to wheat fields—and moved to new housing on steeper slopes farther away from the mansion. Other living arrangements changed too. The new overseer’s house, instead of sitting directly adjacent to the slave quarters, now was more distant. In addition, the slave houses themselves were scattered more widely, and in some cases were out of sight of each other and the overseer.

Together, such changes may have provided some enslaved workers with greater autonomy, and researchers are exploring the hypothesis that autonomy was in part an outgrowth of the more complex labor arrangements necessary to grow wheat. Growing the grain required slaves to acquire specialized skills associated with plowing fields, such as maintaining draft animals and tools like plows and scythes. Wheat often required the slaves to work in smaller groups scattered widely across the plantation, which made it too costly to sustain the tobacco-era practice of using a single overseer to monitor a compact group of relatively lowskilled workers, often using violence to maintain discipline.

Researchers believe a more nuanced relationship evolved in which some enslaved field workers were able to achieve modest improvements in autonomy and material wealth thanks to their greater skills, and hence value, to slave owners. At the same time, because wheat was less labor intensive than tobacco, enslaved families were more likely to be divided as Jefferson and other Virginia slave owners sold surplus laborers into the deep south.

As wheat took hold, changes were also occurring within

Two portions of a Chinese porcelain plate that was broken in the 1770s. Archaeologists found the portion on the right in a deposit associated with construction of Jefferson’s terraced vegetable garden next to the mansion. The left portion was found in a subfloor pit at Site 8, which was home to enslaved field laborers.

Monticello’s enslaved households. During the tobacco era, for example, slave quarters that once sat along Monticello’s Mulberry Row—a lane next to the main house that was lined with workshops, gardens, and living spaces—tended to have relatively large barracks-like rooms that featured multiple pits dug into their floors. Neiman said the residents likely used the pits, which would have been covered by floorboards, as “safe deposit boxes” for their weekly rations of food and other valuables.

In the 1790s, however, the rooms in newly built slave dwellings at Monticello were generally smaller and had only one pit, or none at all. That, Neiman surmised, suggests slaves were allowed more say over who they lived with, and they chose others they trusted, such as family.

AS Monticello became established, there is evidence of increasing material wealth among some of the plantation’s slaves. During the tobacco era, for instance, archaeologists found relatively little evidence of fancier imported ceramics and commercial goods in sites occupied by enslaved field laborers, suggesting they had little access to the consumer economy. One intriguing exception is one-half of a hand-painted porcelain plate, imported from China, found in 2003 in a subfloor pit at Site 8 that dated to the 1770s.

Karen Smith, a Monticello archaeologist, noticed that the fragment fitted perfectly with another, found more than twenty years earlier near the main house a half-mile away. One plausible scenario is that the mansion’s residents had broken the plate and then thrown it out in the mid-1770s. “And it appears that, at that time, even half a porcelain plate was considered unusual and valuable enough by [a slave] to be worth picking out of the trash and carting home,” Neiman noted.

By the early 1790s, however, sherds of Chinese porcelain appear with greater regularity in areas occupied by enslaved people. The shift suggested that “over time, some of Monticello’s slaves were gaining access to the cash economy and consumer products,” he said. “Porcelain began to become a regular part of the household inventory, and a broken piece that would have been a valuable find twenty or thirty years earlier becomes less attractive. And instead of trying to mend broken pieces, slave households are just throwing them out, and we are finding the pieces with the rest of their trash.”

The pottery sherds are also providing intriguing evidence of differences in wealth and stability among contemporaneous slave settlements located near one another. At one cluster of slave houses at Site 8, for instance, researchers have found numerous bits of imported Chinese porcelain, one of the costliest types of pottery in the late 1700s. But

there are far fewer such sherds at a second cluster just a few hundred feet away. And while the first cluster of houses featured subfloor storage pits, it appears that the second had none. Both observations suggest that slaves living in the first community were somewhat better off than those in the second, according to researchers.

A similar story of inequality among Monticello’s slaves emerges from studies of the size and distribution of ceramic sherds and metal nails found at adjacent slave communities. In the 1980s, archaeologists recognized that mapping the characteristics of artifacts—such as their size or completeness—around a site could offer insights into the stability and permanence of the occupation. For example, residents tended to be tidier at more permanent settlements: they disposed of large pieces of cracked pottery. This often created a pattern of larger debris encircling a settlement. In contrast, temporary occupations were characterized by the residents dumping trash, regardless of size, next to their dwellings, because they weren’t around long enough to be bothered by it.

These contrasting patterns are seen at slave settlements dating to the wheat era. “It may be that we have two classes of folks living side-by-side,” said Neiman. “One appears to have more stability and control over their lives, while the other appears to be much more uncertain, and not sure how long they are going to be around.” One possibility is that some settlements housed slaves who knew

they were staying at Monticello, while others sheltered laborers that Jefferson had temporarily “rented” from other slave owners. Recent digs have also examined the lives of slaves who lived and worked at the main house. This past summer archaeologists examined two rooms in Monticello’s south wing. Historical records suggest that one of them—which one is not clear—was used by Sally Hemings, who was a half-sister to Jefferson’s wife and mother of six of Jefferson’s children. In these thirteenby-fifteen-foot windowless spaces, they discovered traces of the original brick floor and a plaster finish and marks to hold shelving on the brick chimney. One of the rooms will become home to an exhibit about Hemings and her life, while the other will be devoted to the Greeting Word oral history project that tells the stories of Monticello’s enslaved families and their descendants. Not far away, in the basement of the South Pavilion, which served as the original kitchen, diggers discovered the brick remains of a waist-high “stew stove” built around 1790 to prepare the French food that Excavation of three feet of fill, deposited in the South Pavilion cellar around 1809, Jefferson favored. revealed the original brick floor of Monticello’s first kitchen. Archaeologists found food The stove, a state-ofremains, including egg shell fragments and fish scales, in the gaps between the bricks. the-art, four-burner model based on European designs, was probably one of the first of its kind in the American colonies. It was likely used by two brothers of Hemings: James, who Jefferson brought to Paris in 1784 to learn French cookery; and Peter, who James trained prior to being freed by Jefferson in 1796. (James later committed

The most important discovery in the South Pavilion cellar was the foundation of a stew stove—an eighteenth-century cook top— that was added to the kitchen after Jefferson returned from four years in France. The stove was necessary to prepare French sauces, fricassees, and custards.

suicide, historical accounts suggest). Jefferson abandoned the stove and the kitchen as part of a major remodel in the early 1800s. Archaeologists were surprised to find its formidable brick base still intact beneath several feet of dirt which Jefferson’s enslaved workers dumped into the room to level its floor with that of the South Wing, which had just been built.

Other finds have helped confirm exactly where Jefferson planted the rows of trees that once lined the flanks of his home. Jefferson was a renowned plant collector and botanist, and he drew meticulous diagrams of his beloved plantings. So it was not a major shock when diggers last summer found telltale splotches of dark soil—a sign of decayed tree roots—in areas along the south wing that Jefferson had designated for saplings. Still, Neiman said, such evidence “is useful for understanding what the grounds actually looked like in Jefferson’s time. Jefferson was an imaginative doodler and only archaeology can tell us which doodles he actually implemented.”

The tree diagrams are just one reminder of Jefferson’s many talents. In the end, however, it turned out that business wasn’t one of them. After returning to Monticello in early 1809 to live out the final years of his life, the former president continued to pile up debts and struggled to make ends meet. After Jefferson died in 1826, his daughter Martha was forced to sell the plantation—including 140 of its slaves, furnishings, and farm equipment—at auction.

Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish commodore in the United States Navy and a big fan of Jefferson’s political views, eventually acquired the property in 1836. The Levy family lost control of Monticello during the Civil War. During the ensuing twenty years, neglect and time took its toll on Jefferson’s house and landscaping, until Jefferson Monroe Levy, Uriah’s nephew, regained control of the property and made extensive repairs to the house, ensuring its survival. Now, nearly 200 years later, archaeologists are getting a better idea of where those trees once stood, and how the people who once worked under their branches were connected to each other, and influenced by the chaotic world far beyond Monticello’s borders.

DAVID MALAKOFF is a deputy news editor at Science magazine. He is a frequent contributor to American Archaeology.