![]() ![]() Cumulatively, the archaeological record strongly suggested that the site had housed part of Poplar Forest's enslaved African-American population between the 1790s and sometime in the 1810s. Over the course of the next three archaeological seasons, excavations at what came to be called the "quarter site" revealed the "footprints" of three structures and their yards as well as more than twenty thousand artifacts dated to the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Filled with a wide array of artifacts ranging from buttons and nails to animal bones and beads, the cellar clearly indicated that human beings had once inhabited the site, but map research yielded no insight as to who might have lived there. ![]() While digging a series of routine test holes before the planting of some new trees, they uncovered the remains of what had once been a small dirt cellar. In 1993, archaeologists at the museum now housing what was once Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest plantation made an accidental discovery. Interpreting the Artifacts of a Slave Community ![]()
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