The Monticello field school offers a hands-on introduction
to basic excavation, recording, and laboratory techniques in archaeology. The
course emphasizes a scientific, multidisciplinary approach to doing landscape
archaeology. It also provides the opportunity to contribute to
cutting-edge research into the ecological and social dynamics that unfolded on
Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Plantation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Technical topics covered include survey and excavation strategies
as well as the analytical possibilities for ceramics, faunal remains, plant
phytoliths and pollen, deposits and the sediments they contain, soils, and
spatial distributions of artifacts across sites and larger landscapes.
Guest lecturers are drawn from a variety of disciplines
including archaeology, geology, ecology, paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, and
history. On-site instruction, lectures, and discussion sessions at Monticello
will be complemented by field trips to related sites. Students will attend
classes forty hours per week, with the bulk of that time spent working in
the field and the lab. Reading assignments, lectures, and discussion sessions
will cover both technical and historical issues.
Our fieldwork addresses changing patterns of land use and
settlement on Thomas Jefferson's, Monticello Plantation from c. 1750 to 1860,
along with their ecological and social causes and consequences. Toward the end
of the 18th century, spurred by shifts in the Atlantic economy, Thomas
Jefferson and planters across the Chesapeake region replaced tobacco
cultivation with a more diversified agricultural regime, based around wheat.
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