Friday, February 7, 2025

Colonial Williamsburg Archaeologists Break Ground on New Excavation

Project area of Peter Scott archaeological site; the Peter Scott archaeological site during the 1958 excavation. (Images courtesy of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

WILLIAMSBURG — What was old is new again as Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists return to a site last excavated in the 1950s — the Peter Scott site — in search of answers to unsolved mysteries.

Beginning in late January, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation said its visitors will have the opportunity to engage with the excavation located across from Bruton Parish Church on the site formerly occupied by the colonial nursery and demonstration garden.

According to the foundation, Scott was a furniture maker who lived and operated his business on the site for over 40 years. The excavation, which is expected to last a minimum of 12 months, will ultimately inform the planned reconstruction of Scott’s house and associated outbuildings and contribute to the overall interpretation of the site, it added.

“We plan to start by targeting some of the exciting features that we already know exist on this site including the foundation of the tenement building and a furnace,” said Jack Gary, Colonial Williamsburg’s executive director of archaeology.  “Visitors won’t have to wait long for some really cool artifacts to start coming up out of the ground.”

The foundation noted that portions of the site were excavated in 1958 by British archaeologist Ivor Noël Hume — one of the first projects that he worked on after he became chief archaeologist and director of Colonial Williamsburg’s archaeology program in 1957.

Noël Hume’s excavation focused on the foundation of the tenement house as well as some of the other more permanent structures on the site including a furnace, the foundation said. However, the excavation was unable to determine the furnace’s function, whether the building functioned as both a residence and a workshop, the presence of additional 18th-century buildings, and whether there were enslaved laborers living and working on the site.

Although artifacts from the 1958 excavation were recovered, the collection is small and not illustrative of Scott’s life, according to the foundation. Gary’s team plans to pick up where Noël Hume left off, excavating enough of the site to answer these questions and more.

“Returning to one of the Foundation’s early archaeology projects with new techniques and new research questions is a full-circle moment,” said Gary. “This site had an important role to play in the lead-up to the American Revolution. We weren’t able to tell the site’s full story when it was first excavated over sixty years ago, but we plan to tell it now.”

For more information about Colonial Williamsburg, visit its official website.

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