A foot under the ground near the I-64 and 264 interchange lie the ruins of a once-thriving colonial city.
Its residents were harbor folk, whose lives revolved around the loading and unloading of British cargo ships. Sailors crowded into taverns along Wharf Street, enslaved African Americans labored on the docks, unloading goods to be stored in warehouses and later sold in the streets of a place the colonists called Newtown.
A team of archaeologists from the College of William & Mary and the Virginia Department of Transportation has spent the past year working to resurrect the 300-year-old town.
It sits beside the off-ramp of exit 15 on Interstate 64, near the border of Norfolk and Virginia Beach. While VDOT has been busy widening the interstate, it has also been busy preserving historical relics that lie in its path.
Those relics, a total of more than 20,000 artifacts along with land records and site maps, were recently detailed in a report by the William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research.
“We’ve reached that final stage — the data recovery stage of archaeology,” said Tom Higgins, a project archaeologist at the college. “The gist of it is, we have a lot of information that we combine to give us a picture, or at least a perspective, of how the town looked and the people who were living there.”
The picture of a vibrant shipping community is a far cry from what the area looks like today. Satellite images of the dig site show a track of earth, roughly 100 feet wide, that runs beside the highway along South Newtown Road, next to a housing complex.
“The site we worked on was a sliver of ground that was sandwiched between a neighborhood and the interstate,” said Higgins. “That was one reason this was so important to get done, because we didn’t know how much of Newtown is left. There has been so much development over the years.”
Reaching this final stage has been decades in the making. In the late 1970s, a group of archaeologists began studying the site after several artifacts were discovered during excavation for a housing development, Higgins said.
Throughout the late 70’s into the early 80’s, the group began mapping the site, recording where archaeological remains had been found. Working off their maps, Higgins and his colleague Joe Jones started working with VDOT archaeologist Ken Stuck to preserve the site, after land surveys were conducted in 2008 for a plan to widen the freeway.
“This may look like it was discovered all of a sudden,” Higgins said. “But it happened over the course of years and years.”
During a six-month period between Dec. 2015 and June 2016, Higgins and Jones worked with teams of six to eight students to excavate the site. They later outlined their findings in a report, which was submitted to VDOT and will become public record.
“Our work in all stages of this was very detail oriented,” Higgins said. “It required a lot recording, detailed mapping, as permanent record of what we do, so that in the future really anyone can come back and look at the records of our excavation and recreate the site.”
