http://www.monticello.org/pressroom/showArticle.php?id=260
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. – The Thomas Jefferson Foundation has been
awarded a grant of $304,971 by the National Endowment for the
Humanities to support the digitization, cataloging, and analysis of
archaeological artifacts from Mulberry Row, the center of African-
American activity on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation, and to
make the data freely available on the Internet.
The NEH funding will allow Monticello to complete its ongoing
reassessment of artifacts collected from 16 Mulberry Row sites during
major archaeological excavations in the 1980s.
Those excavations, initiated to shed light on the daily lives of the
enslaved African Americans who lived and worked on the 1,000-foot-long
dirt path located between the Monticello house and the terraced
Vegetable Garden, uncovered more than 600,000 artifacts. The
archaeological interpretation of these artifacts at the time relied
largely on documents from the period, especially a 1796 plat of the
area.
In 2000, staff archaeologists began the process of re-evaluating the
Mulberry Row material by systematically cataloging the artifacts
according to the protocols set by the Digital Archaeological Archive
of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), a research consortium based at
Monticello. To date, work has been finished on the artifact
collections from seven of the 16 Mulberry Row sites and is in progress
on the findings from three others. The Mulberry Row Reassessment
project is supervised by Karen Y. Smith, Monticello’s curator of
archaeological collections.
Data from the project will made available in different forms on the
DAACS Web site (www.daacs.org), a resource intended primarily for
researchers, and on the Monticello Explorer (http://explorer.monticello.org
), an interactive, multimedia feature designed for the general public.
“The NEH grant will let us complete the project and get analytical
control over all the artifacts and their contexts from the slave
houses and workshops that lined Mulberry Row in Jefferson’s day,” said
Fraser D. Neiman, Monticello’s director of archaeology. “When we
finish, Monticello will be the only historic site in the country with
complete, detailed data from all its archaeological projects on the
Web.”
NEH is an independent grant-making agency of the federal government
dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public
programs in the humanities.
In awarding the grant to Monticello, NEH designated the Mulberry Row
archaeology project a We the People project. We the People is an NEH
initiative designed to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study,
and understanding of American history and culture.
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