June 2011, Cover Stories, Discoveries

Mount Vernon’s Archaeological Collections Online Project

By Eleanor Breen   Mon, May 16, 2011

In his article entitled, “So you want to be an archaeologist,” the archaeological 'prophet' Brian Fagan (2006:60) recently predicted: “At a minimum, the emphasis [in archaeology] will shift from field research to investigations of existing collections…  The chances of your doing laboratory research rather than fieldwork throughout your career increase every year.”  Nowhere is the trend better evidenced than in the developing and changing virtual world of archaeology.  George Washington’s Mount Vernon, a privately held historic house museum owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA), has recently undertaken an exciting and innovative initiative called Archaeological Collections Online, the result of which will be a website devoted to an important archaeological feature excavated in the early 1990s and curated by MVLA.  This feature, an oval-shaped midden (the South Grove Midden), contains evidence of the material lives of successive generations of Washington households and the enslaved individuals who lived and labored in the mansion and surrounding outbuildings.  Despite the site’s significance to Mount Vernon, colonial history, and historical archaeology, the collection (like many others here and at other historic sites) is rarely seen by anyone except the occasional lucky visitor to the off-site archaeology lab.  Bits and pieces of the feature’s assemblage have gone or are currently on exhibit, starred in publications, and spurred on theses and dissertations, but the artifacts still await a comprehensive analysis and presentation.  With much foresight, the Ladies, with direction from Mount Vernon’s Archaeology Department, decided to reach this goal through an interactive, in-depth, content-driven, and well-illustrated website.

(Above, Right) Excavations of the South Grove Midden site, facing north.  The south side of the Mansion is visible in the background.

Archaeology Online

The support of this project by MVLA and our prestigious and generous donor group called the Life Guard Society could not be more timely.  As Dr. Fagan suggests, archaeology is increasingly occurring in the lab or the curation facility as emphasis shifts from accumulating new data to revisiting old, previously excavated data that either received no analysis and interpretation or that warrant re-analysis in light of new questions or through contemporary theoretical lenses.  This institutional support coincides with a new era of archaeology online and an increased focus on digitizing artifact and object collections.  This will result in a unique and cutting edge web-based product featuring the archaeology of Mount Vernon and will hopefully provide a model for future web endeavors focusing on other archaeological sites around the estate.    

Much of archaeology’s presence online initially came in the form of dig diaries.  In field school, young and eager archaeology students are instructed to keep a diary or journal of their daily activities in the field, lest they forget which test unit they were working on or what they found from one plowzone layer to the next.  In this modern digital age, many of these dig diaries began appearing online, thereby increasing the audience from one (the field school teaching assistant) to many.  Theoretically, dig diaries serve to answer Ian Hodder’s (1999) call for archaeologists to be more transparent in their research questions and self-reflexive as they shovel or trowel, and to consider the biases that might enter into interpretations.  This format challenges archaeologists not only to think about what we do on a daily or weekly basis, but how we communicate that information to many audiences.  Publicly, dig dairies illuminate the process of archaeology – from survey through discovery. 

Mount Vernon’s Archaeology Department has dabbled in dig diarying since 2003, when we partnered with Archaeology Magazine to create Distilling the Past – a featured interactive dig that took place over an eight month period as we excavated the site of George Washington’s whiskey distillery, still archived at archaeology.org (Christensen 2004).  Looking back on it now, I am not sure how much light we shed upon the archaeological record or the late eighteenth-century distiller or his enslaved assistants by kvteching about the rain and what felt like a never-ending chore of bailing a site the size of an Olympic pool (as evidenced in recurring diary themes), but it was a good effort and we reached a much wider audience than were able to visit the site.  More importantly, we were able to present the full context in which an archaeological site is situated including historical documentation and previous excavations.  Dig diaries continue to be an important part of archaeology’s presence online, with Jamestown perhaps being the best current example, at least in historical archaeology, with their well-illustrated “What are they digging now?” blog which dates back to 2003. 

From Dig Diaries to Digitized Databases

The digitization and presentation of collections-based information has proven more challenging to archaeologists than the reporting of field work.  Archaeologists at Mount Vernon struggled with how to make use of the “Archaeological Collections” section of the soon-to-be-upgraded website.  Different institutions have approached the issue in myriad ways, by highlighting the “coolest” of artifacts that emerge from the ground or by digitizing and uploading reports based on the archaeological work that include artifact data, as Colonial Williamsburg and the City of Alexandria in Virginia have done.  Typically, the presentation of archaeological collections online falls into two formats: digitized type collections and comparative databases. 

The early 2000s saw a profusion of online study collections created to answer questions like, how do you tell the difference between white salt-glazed stoneware and tin-glazed earthenware?  What vessel forms are typical for Nottingham stoneware?  What is the difference between North Devon gravel-tempered earthenware and Buckley?  The state of Maryland and the Florida Museum of Natural History are leaders in this effort for ceramics.  The Bureau of Land Management and the Society for Historical Archaeology have facilitated bottle glass identification.  Outside of the United States, the Museum of London and the Colony of Avalon make catalogues of maker’s marks on tobacco pipes available online.        

As additional evidence to Fagan’s point about intensified focus on previously excavated collections, websites like the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) and A Comparative Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture have sprung up.  The research designs behind these two sites are similar – as a critical mass of slave sites (in the case of the former) and seventeenth-century sites (in the case of the latter) accumulated, the archaeologists spearheading these projects recognized the need to take a break from the field and begin to delve into the artifact boxes to see what larger cultural patterns emerged from comparative analyses.  These two efforts, as you can imagine, are massive and yet their undertaking highlights two of the most contentious and important issues in the field of archaeology: comparability and accessibility.  DAACS has addressed the comparability issue by developing a standardized way of cataloguing sites associated with slavery in the Atlantic World and the accessibility issue by making these data available online and searchable.  Though focused intently on a single topic, the DAACS effort is being echoed at a broader scale with initiatives like TDAR, The Digital Archaeological Record, which seeks to encourage and advise those who amassed the archaeological record on how best to promote, present, and preserve it.  Taking a quick look into the world of museums, we find that this effort to simply get as much of one’s collection up online as possible is equally strong.  People, everyone from my mom to academic researchers, want to know what lies behind Door Number One either as they decide how much of their busy vacations they will allot to one museum or to assess how specific research questions, like which institution houses the most extensive collection of tin-glazed earthenware punch bowls, could be answered by what is curated in the collection.  In fact, in a recent research paper that I wrote for the Society for Historical Archaeology meetings, I was able to amass a database of over 200 punch vessels, including details like measurements and date ranges, without stepping foot into a museum storage space (Breen 2011).  And in this modern world where everything is at our finger tips, that is how we want our museums.

One of the more interesting developments of late in the world of online collections can be seen in the convergence of dig diarying and collections management.  Attesting to the popularity of the blog-like, dig diary format, lab-related diaries increasingly appear online.  Museums like the Smithsonian and Northeast Museum Services Center blog and even twitter about collections management and research related issues. Facebook has offered an easy and accessible social and archaeological networking tool for the Archaeological Collections Online project called Mount Vernon’s Mystery Midden.  A few times a week, we post artifact research discoveries, links to cool websites, and things just for fun, like when Flat Stanley came to visit the archaeology lab.  This venue has offered a great way to bridge the time lag between when the project started and the ultimate web product.       

Mount Vernon’s Archaeological Collections Online Project

We hope that the Archaeological Collections Online will lead the next generation of virtual archaeology by filling a niche that is not currently available – an anthropologically-informed approach to digitizing collections.  What this project seeks to do that others have not is provide content information, utilizing a holistic material culture approach that engages with the documentary record of plantation-specific and more broadly regional data, museum object collections, and material culture theory to provide answers to questions like what did this punch bowl mean to the people who viewed, used, and discarded it?  How and what do artifacts tell us about the past, about plantation life, about active consumers, about the Washington households, about the enslaved community?  We will address those nagging comparability and accessibility issues by cataloguing the site into DAACS, with the full catalogue ultimately to be made available at daacs.org.  Further, the website will be structured so that this rich material record of plantation life will not only be digestible to fellow archaeologists, but also by the public, folks like my mom who has a general (and familial) interest in the stuff of George Washington.  Our webdesigner, Mark Freeman (2011), calls this approach a “comprehensive information framework for the objects” that will include stratigraphic, temporal, documentary, and theoretical context.

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Wine bottle seal excavated from the midden bearing the Fairfax Family coat of arms, nearby neighbors and friends of the Washingtons.

To briefly outline our website structure in progress, we envision a triangle.  At the top of the triangle, or at the front of the website, will be a searchable gallery of the top 400 most significant, whole, and unique objects from the assemblage complete with high quality photographs and details on identification, manufacturing technique, material, etc.  This tip of the iceberg approach is meant to draw in a more general audience who can then decide how far into the triangle they wish to delve.  Content pages will live in the middle of the website where we plan to discuss and contextualize sub-assemblages of artifacts such as buttons or tobacco pipes.  Not only will archaeological data be presented, but we will also engage the documentary record to better understand the universe of this sub-assemblage.  These sub-assemblages will then be linked to the research themes that they address including gender, gentility, slavery, and even tourism (as we have a handful of artifacts like a Gumby and a 1950s girl scout ring that speak to the transition of Mount Vernon from house to historic site).

(Right) Intricately carved stone fan blades excavated from the midden.     

Like most field archaeology, this project is being undertaken by one funded staff member with occasional assistance from other staff and a devoted team of volunteers and undergraduate and graduated college interns.  Part of the challenge to any project like this is convincing skeptical potential volunteers that lab work is as exciting as field work.  All the artifacts have been washed and rebagged, all the ceramics and glass have been labeled, and yet there is much more to be done – from artifact research to rethinking historical documents from an archaeological perspective.  We try to find the right “lab work” for all interested parties.  For example, right now one of our loyal volunteers, Judi Paulos, is transcribing and annotating the probate inventory of Lawrence Washington (Washington 1753).  This crucial document has only rarely seen the light of day, remains unpublished, and yet offers a fantastic textual artifact that will inform us about what George Washington’s elder and respected half-brother had in his possession at Mount Vernon in the year of his death.  Another equally dedicated (and even long distance) volunteer, Wendy Miervaldis, applied her expertise in statistics to gauge the significance of estimated capacity measurements for tin-glazed punch bowls.  Pat Greco has applied his woodworking skills to the task of carving ethafoam for mounts for mended ceramic vessels.  Lab work, in summary, is an easy sell if we only understand its full scope.  We believe that with this Archaeological Collections Online project, we are entering a new era of archaeology on the web -- an era in which nuanced and holistic archaeological collections information is presented to the general public, but also is accessible and serving the needs of archaeologists looking for comparative data.

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 Volunteers, the Grecos, aid in housing reconstructed ceramic vessels in archivally sound mounts. 

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Milestones in Historical Archaeological Collections Online

2002   Diagnostic Artifacts in Maryland launched. 

2003   National Endowment for the Humanities provides funding for the creation of an online digital type collection for the Florida Museum of Natural History historical archaeology collections. 

2004    DAACS goes live, initial funding by Mellon Foundation in 2000.

2005    BLM-supported Historic Bottle Glass identification website launched.

2006    The final report for the Comparative Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture is submitted to NEH, off of which the website is based.

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References

Breen, Eleanor

2011   One More Bowl and Then?  Analyzing Techniques for Comparing Ceramic Assemblages.  Paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference, Austin, TX.  < http://www.mountvernon.org/files/Breen,_SHA%202011,%20written.pdf>.  Accessed 11 May 2011.

Christensen, Kim

2004   Tourists, Schoolchildern, and Liquor Lobbyists: The Various Publics of the Mount Vernon Distillery Site.  Paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference, St. Louis, MO.  < http://www.mountvernon.org/files/Kchristensen.pdf>  Accessed 11 May 2011.

Fagan, Brian

2006   So you want to be an Archaeologist? Archaeology May/June 59(3):59-64.

Freeman, Mark

2011   Should You Object? Mount Vernon Midden Archaeology. < http://storiespast.blogspot.com/2011/04/should-you-object-mount-vernon-midden.html?spref=fb >. Blog post, 12 April.

Hodder, Ian

1999  The Archaeological Process: An Introduction.  Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.

Washington, George

1753   An Inventory of the Estate of Lawrence Washington, 7-8 March. Historical

Manuscript Collection, Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, Mount Vernon, VA.

By Eleanor Breen

Eleanor Breen is supervisor of the Archaeological Collections Online project.  She is also currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  Before returning to school, she worked at Mount Vernon excavating sites such as George Washington’s whiskey distillery.