C-SPAN Cities Tour- Alexandria: Archaeology in Alexandria

We're standing here in the Alexandria Archaeology Museum. And this is the museum that was established in 1984. The museum here is a working laboratory. And the Archaeology Museum was conceptualized as a place where you see archaeologists at work. So we're going to see these archaeologists doing the actual work of sorting and cataloging the artifacts from one of our research sites that is Shooter's Hill. It's a plantation site. In addition, we have a collection from an African-American community that lived on Fort Ward from the time period after the Civil War until the city acquired the land to create a park. Now we're going to go and look at what happens when the archaeological artifacts come into the laboratory. This is really, as I said, a working museum. It's archaeologists' work is the concept around which the museum was developed. So a couple of days a week, you'll see students and interns and archaeologists working on processing the artifacts that get recovered during the archaeological excavations. This site is located on the grounds of the George Washington Masonic Memorial, which is a hill right on the edge of Old Town as you look up the main artery of the city, King Street. And the site is a plantation site that dates from about 1781 until the 1840s when the large plantation house burns down. And it then is occupied by the Civil War Union Army during the war. And later, it is the site of an estate that lasted until the 20th century. One of the best stories about the plantation laundry is that we actually know the name of one of the enslaved African-Americans who would have been working on that site. Her name was Esther. And we know a little bit about her family from deeds and records that we have encountered fortuitously researching another site. So we placed her in this laundry site, which is probably, for me, one of the most touching parts of connecting the archaeology with the historical record. We're now going to go over to another site that we have been excavating recently. It's called the Fort Ward Community Site. We began to realize that this was an African-American community that developed on the property after the Civil War. African-American refugees from various parts of the war-torn areas of Virginia were drawn to this area because of the Union occupation at these fortifications. And all of the yellow structures that you see are homes that were built on the fort. In addition, there were a number of cemeteries that were located. And those are in the orange colors. They're known cemeteries as well as potential cemeteries on the property. Now, the fort community was thriving from probably the 1870s and 1880s into the time period when the city acquired the property for the creation of Fort Ward in the 1950s and 60s. One of the most exciting parts of this project is that there are many descendants of this community who still live in Alexandria and in the local community. Their oral history accounts give us a really good idea of some aspects of life in the community that we would never be able to determine from just the archaeological records. As you can see from this exhibit, one of my favorite artifacts in this exhibit is a teapot that is made of Japanese porcelain. And when this artifact was shown to one of the descendants of the occupants of the Ashby house, her name is Stephanie Gordon, it brought back a flood of memories of tea parties that the community members would have had on this site. And it is really very poignant to know that this artifact could invoke such incredible memories and emotions. So this project is really about determining where the concentrations of artifacts from the different time periods exist so that planning for new activities in the park, changing locations of parking lots, all of the things that go into managing the park, knowing where things need to be preserved and where additional construction can occur. And that is one of the goals of this project. What I want to show you now is the oldest artifact that was found in the city of Alexandria. It is a Native American tool that was created and discarded at the Freedmen's Cemetery site. This would have been used during the late Pleistocene time period. Traditionally, the Clovis time period is thought to extend from about 11,000 years ago to about 9,000 years ago. But recent radiocarbon dating has suggested that the Clovis type of point dates to about 13,000 years ago. And that is why we have used this 13,000 year date. We're very excited that this artifact was recovered. So we have seen at the museum the wide range of artifact types, the wide range of sites that we have in the city of Alexandria. And again, this museum is the place where we feature what we have excavated. But throughout the city, we know that history is beneath our feet. And there are trails that you can walk that will highlight the archeology and the history of the community. And there are parks that you can visit that resulted from archeological work, like Freedmen's Cemetery. There's an African-American Heritage Park. There are interpretive signs up throughout the city which feature the archeological information that we've collected. So our museum is not just about the history in this building. It is about the history of the city as a whole.