By Brooks McCabe It’s the sixth week and final week of Poplar Forest’s archaeology field school. This week, the students wrapped up their excavations, and each student gave a presentation on an artifact or topic of his or her choosing and how it relates to the site we worked on this summer. Of the […]
By Nancy Williams This week, we learned about and participated in Public Archaeology. On July 4th, many members of the public came down to the site to learn about what we have discovered. Some people were more interested in the artifacts and some with the potential features being found in the ground. We cleaned […]
By Jackson DeWitt Week 4 of the Poplar Forest field school was one of the most exciting yet! We started out the week by expanding two of the test pits we’d excavated into larger 5x5ft units, in an effort to explore some of the more interesting features and artifacts we’d found. In these units, […]
By Morgan Reeder It was a busy week for the Poplar Forest field school! We started off by taking a field trip to Monticello on Monday. We had the opportunity to sit in and listen to a lecture by Dr. Fraser Neiman, the Director of Archaeology at Monticello. We also were able to talk […]
By Kaitlyn Holmes In our second week here at Poplar Forest, the field school started by listening to a very important and interesting lecture on historic ceramics. After the lecture, we all went out to resume the field work on our units and to also write, map, and take photos to have as important […]
By Emma Coffey Poplar Forest’s 2022 Archaeology Field School began this week and already students are finding incredibly interesting things. Before the students began their initial excavations, they were given a tour of the house and the archaeology lab along with a lecture on Poplar Forest’s history on Monday. Since then, they have been […]
By J. Brooks McCabe This was the last week for our Field School students. The students wrapped up the remaining units behind the South Tenant House. The recovered artifacts date after Jefferson’s life, such as possible iron handles, tableware and other ceramics. Along with the units at the South Tenant House, the two remaining 5×5 […]
by Savhanna Long This week was very exciting for our Field School students, as they finished up their units from the Stable Survey and moved onto the area behind the South Tenant House! The students began to close up their larger 5’x5’ units that were focused in areas of particular interest due to their artifacts […]
By Mary Del Vecchio This week is about landscape archaeology. We began learning about the different subfields of archaeology like what pollen analysis can tell us and how GIS (Geographic Information Systems) were used at Poplar Forest to help find where sites could be located. We learned how this technology could assist and we also […]
by Lewis Ward This week for Field School at Poplar Forest, we did quite a bit of traveling mixed in with our usual itinerary of digging. For the past few weeks, we have mainly been working on 2’ x 2’ holes, at the South East Curtilage site, in hopes to find evidence of a stable. […]
by Melissa Penner The Archaeology Field School at Poplar Forest learned about the artifacts found during excavations in the past and applied these lessons to the theme of the week: material culture. Lectures taught by Dr. Jenn focused on the types of materials excavators have- and will- find in the Poplar Forest field grounds such […]
The department kicked off its 30th annual archaeological field school this Monday and welcomed seven undergraduates as students. For the next six weeks they’ll be writing our blog posts and recounting their excavations, finds, and field trips as the class progresses.