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Archaeology

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The Hunt for Historic Graves

Friday, August 28th, 2020

by Kristen Minogue

Author’s Note: SERC is keenly interested in finding more descendants of the Sellmans, Contees, enslaved Black families, tenant farmers and others who lived and worked on what is now the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. If you wish to be part of documenting our shared history, please send information to Kristen Minogue at minoguek@si.edu.

Split gray tombstone amid forest understory, speckled with shadows of the forest canopy

The tombstone of Thomas Francis from 1685, now split in two. (Credit: Christine Dunham)

On March 19, 1685, a major named Thomas Francis took his wife on a boating trip to visit their neighbors across the Rhode River, at a plantation called Tulip Hill in southern Maryland. He never returned. Francis drowned in a boating accident on the way back, at the young age of 42.

His tombstone bore a poetic inscription urging his family not to mourn, but to hope for a reunion after death. One snippet read: “For tho grim death thought fitt to part us here/Rejoyce & think that wee shall once appeare/At that great day when all shall Summond be.”

Fast forward to the 1850s. The field where Thomas Francis lies buried now sits near the intersection of two plantations belonging to the Contee and Sellman families. Both families rely heavily on enslaved Black families to grow wheat, corn and tobacco. Like many wealthy plantation owners, the Sellmans bury their dead in a family cemetery near the house.

Dozens of people lived, toiled and died on the land that today forms the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). But much remains unknown about their burials. SERC staff knew that Thomas Francis’ tombstone—reportedly the oldest in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County—was on SERC property, but at least a decade had passed since anyone had seen it. Three gravestones once inside the Sellman family cemetery now sit in the nearby All Hallows Church. While small footstones and brick pavers still mark the original graves, SERC staff didn’t know how many other Sellmans lay under the site. There are rumors, but no definitive records, of where the enslaved people had their final resting place.

Today, a team of archaeologists, historians, citizen scientists and cadaver dogs is on the brink of solving the mystery.
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Volunteer Spotlight: Sarah Grady, Explorer of Past & Future Landscapes

Thursday, April 4th, 2019

by Sara Richmond

Sarah Grady standing by large seive

Sarah Grady and other archaeology volunteers use this large wooden sieve to sift through soil in search of artifacts. (Photo: Sara Richmond)

In 2012, Sarah Grady was waiting tables at the Old Stein Inn and deciding what to do with her new anthropology degree when a restaurant customer told her about the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s Archaeology Lab, located just a few miles from the restaurant. Soon after she became the lab’s second volunteer, working with volunteer lab director Jim Gibb to excavate plots and crunch data. Six and a half years later, Sarah is the lab’s assistant director. The year-round program has grown from just her and Jim to a group of roughly a dozen citizen scientist volunteers who gather every Wednesday to dig and learn about each other’s projects.

The Archaeology Lab is the only all-volunteer lab at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). Currently the lab hosts 16 ongoing projects, all of which citizen science volunteers have undertaken on their own.

“We guide them,” says Sarah, “but most of them have taken the research into their own hands and are even making appointments with other scientists to discuss.” Click to continue »

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Ten Reasons We’re Earth Optimists After 2016

Friday, January 13th, 2017
Dawn Miller in forest

Ecologist Dawn Miller surveys trees in a SERC forest. (SERC)

by Kristen Minogue

The Smithsonian has a new resolution for 2017: Earth Optimism. This is the year the Smithsonian is celebrating environmental success stories, and shifting the focus to how we can fight battles to save species and preserve our planet—and win. Despite breaking a wide swath of climate records, 2016 gave us reasons for optimism as well. In our 2016 Year in Review, we’ve pulled out the most encouraging stories and discoveries at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center from the previous year. Here are the top 10 that make us hopeful about the planet’s future:

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Time Lords and Ladies of History’s Trash

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2016

by Emily Li

Digging through soil plot

Citizen scientist Linda Perkins helps excavate a soil plot in front of the Contee mansion ruins. (Photo: SERC)

People don’t usually think of archaeologists as dumpster divers. Then again, sifting through trash for hidden treasures is exactly what the volunteer citizen scientists of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) Archaeology Lab do every Wednesday. But they don’t scavenge anything for themselves. (The market for millenia-old oyster shells is very unpredictable, and any food they find is always up to three centuries past its expiration date.) Instead, they take away new skills and a chance to put together a historical puzzle larger than themselves.

“We look back thousands of years,” said Jim Gibb, the lead volunteer and coordinator of the lab. “I always tell people—we’re the time lords.”  Click to continue »

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Key to Oysters’ Future Lies in Past

Monday, May 23rd, 2016
Oyster midden

Typical American Indian oyster deposit, roughly 1,000 years old. (Torben Rick/Smithsonian)

by John Gibbons

Oysters have provided food for humans for millennia, and play an enormous role in sustaining estuaries around the world. Yet after more than a century of overfishing, pollution, disease and habitat degradation, oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere have suffered dramatic declines. But for thousands of years,American Indians in the region harvested the shellfish from the Bay sustainably—a discovery published Monday that could offer clues for future oyster restoration.

Little is known about oyster populations prior to the late 1800s. On May 23 a team of Smithsonian scientists and other researchers published the first bay-wide, millennial-scale study of oyster harvesting in the Chesapeake in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using fossil, archaeological, and modern biological data, the team was able to reconstruct changes in oyster size from four timeframes: the Pleistocene (780,000-13,000 years ago), prehistoric American Indian occupation (3,200 – 400 years ago), historic (400 – 50 years ago) and modern times (2000 to 2014).

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Frigid Days Equal Fewer Bluebird Eggs

Wednesday, July 8th, 2015
Male and female bluebirds at a nesting box.

Male and female bluebirds at a nest box. (Matt Storms)

by Chris Patrick

Eastern bluebirds resemble flying, fist-sized jewels. Males are sapphire colored—royal-blue heads, backs, and wings contrast with rust-colored chests. Females are more gray than blue, but their wings are subtly tinted the same sapphire hue.

Since 2008, citizen scientists have monitored bluebirds at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). The Bluebird Project is citizen science intern Caroline Kanaskie’s self-proclaimed “baby” this summer. She is uncovering why bluebird numbers at SERC have been lower than usual.  Click to continue »

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Why 900 Years of Ancient Oysters Went Missing

Friday, August 29th, 2014

by Kristen Minogue

Piscataway Indians lived on the Rhode River up to colonial times, though anthropologists believe they used the land for temporary campsites, not permanent settlements.

Piscataway Indians lived on the Rhode River up to colonial times, though anthropologists believe they used the land for temporary campsites, not permanent settlements.

For more than 10,000 years, Native Americans hunted and fished in the Chesapeake. Broken pottery, village sites, burial grounds and other artifacts bear witness to their near-continuous presence around the Bay. But one type of artifact—ancient trash piles called shell middens—hasn’t received as much attention. And these tell another important story.

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Learning by Digging: Archeology Project Explores Colonial Life

Tuesday, June 10th, 2014

Scientists, students, and volunteers unearth late 17th– and 18th-century objects behind Sellman House

by Sarah Hansen

Volunteers excavate a new pit at the “Shaw’s Folly” site behind Sellman House.

On a sunny June afternoon at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, students and volunteers are hard at work in a cornfield behind the Sellman House.  Some shovel soil out of pits.  Others screen it with giant sieves, looking for artifacts.  Still others use trowels to smooth the bottom and sides of the pit, hoping to reveal differences in soil coloration and texture.  This scene will repeat every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday from about 9a.m. to 4 p.m. until June 20.  Guided by Laura Cripps, acting Chair of Social and Cultural Sciences at Howard Community College, and Jim Gibb, head of SERC’s Archaeology Lab, the group is excavating a site that contains objects and building materials that provide a window into 17th– and 18th-century life.

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What the Plantation Owners Left Behind

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

by Kristen Minogue

Homestead House, called Woodlawn by its first residents in the early 1700s. (SERC)

On the western shore of Chesapeake Bay, less than a mile from the Rhode River, there is an old red house on an abandoned farm. Once, in the 18th century, it belonged to a thriving plantation. The hilled rows of tobacco have vanished, along with the field hands, tenant farmers and generations of enslaved Africans and African Americans who planted them. But the scars on the landscape remain. The surrounding earth carries traces of how each of its inhabitants have used it, or abused it.

The house’s first inhabitants in the early 1700s called it Woodlawn. Today it is known simply as the Homestead House. The building and its surrounding farmland now sit within the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Instead of enslaved laborers and field hands, teams of volunteers are overturning the soil in search of clues about its past.

Archaeologist Jim Gibb began the excavation at SERC earlier in August. His volunteers come for a single afternoon, or several weeks. He isn’t terribly picky about long-term commitments. Gibb welcomes anyone who can handle a shovel and is at least ten years old (and even that rule is flexible). Under his guidance, they are piecing together the story of one household’s legacy on the land.

The team made one of their biggest discoveries just a few weeks into the project, when they uncovered a brick foundation sprinkled with household artifacts. One possibility is that it was a storage shed. Another, that it was someone’s home.

“If someone was living in that in the early 19th century, and we know where the owners were living, then we do the math,” Gibb said. “They have to be labor. And at that point, probably slave labor.”

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