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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