IU archeology unearths Monticello

Sophomore Luke Walker describes archeology as a field where one can get paid to discover history, paid to rewrite textbooks.

Recent research by IU archeologists further proves Walker’s idealized description.

Long-held beliefs about Thomas Jefferson’s dream home, Monticello, in Virginia have been revamped thanks to an IU team that spent spring break conducting field research on the plantation.

They discovered that Jefferson changed the original land surface of Monticello more drastically than previous archeologists and historians believed— about 25,000 cubic feet more, said William Monaghan, interim director and senior research scientist at the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archeology at IU.

It was Monaghan, Walker and undergraduate student Joel Marshall that conducted the research during break.

“We could see the original ground line where Jefferson dumped fill,” Monaghan said. “There was two to three times more fill there than everybody thought.”

The IU team was helping with a long-term project at Monticello called the Monticello Plantation Archeological Survey, a project that is being carried out by archeologists from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

The purpose of the survey is to discover what Monticello looked like before Jefferson lived there and what it looked like after he restructured it, Monaghan said. The ultimate goal is to get the property back to Jefferson’s original vision in order to improve the site’s historical accuracy.

“We want to provide our visitors with a more accurate historical representation of Monticello,” said Sara Bon-Harper, archeological research manager at Monticello.

Monaghan and his two field assistants, Walker and Marshall, were given a grant to join Monticello archeologists and work on a specific part of the survey dubbed “the kitchen road project.”

They used two state of the art methods to uncover the location of two roads, one leading to the kitchen, that Jefferson created in the 1800s and have since been lost, buried under layers and layers of time and restructuring.

One of these techniques was a process known to archeologists as electrical resistivity.

The process involves injecting electricity into the ground at certain points to measure how easily currents can pass through. They were looking for areas of earth with high resistivity, areas that told them where gravel could be located.

And where there is gravel, there were likely once roads, Monaghan said.

Once those spots were identified, a physical core of the ground would be removed for closer examination.

Bon-Harper said their work allowed Monticello archeologists to more carefully place excavation sites based on where roads were likely located.

At these sites, the Monticello archeologists hope to restructure the roads, which have been officially located. The next step is for the foundation to approve the rebuilding, Bon-Harper said.

But the “kitchen road project” became about more than just roads.

An offshoot was the discovery that Jefferson did a great deal more restructuring to the land than once thought.

In order to create his ideal plantation, Jefferson had to manually flatten the top of Monticello Mountain, Monaghan said.

He scraped away from certain areas, and added to others. The original roads were much further below current ground level, and the IU team brought this to light.

Now archeologists are wondering why Jefferson added so much fill, and where that fill came from.

“Every time you go out and research new questions come up,” Monaghan said. “An archeological site is never static.”

Though Monaghan’s portion of the project is complete, the total survey of the plantation will likely take a lifetime, he said.

It has been going on for more than a decade.

“We’re looking at parts of history for which there are incomplete records,” Monaghan said. “You’ll find that a lot of details in life weren’t really kept in records.”