Tag Archives: artifacts

Not ANOTHER Utility Line?! The 1991 Excavation

Esther White / Director of Archaeology After opening square 328 at the end of the 1990 excavation season and spending the winter cataloguing and analyzing the artifacts, we were more than ready to return to the south grove in June … Continue reading

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1990 – The Excavation Begins (or the year of the Holly Hole)

Esther White / Director of Archaeology There’s a simple principle that guides a lot of archaeological research – archaeologists routinely find trash near where it was generated.  So in 1990, Mount Vernon’s archaeologists were scheduled to begin a multi-year excavation … Continue reading

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Fanning the Flames of Fashion

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online On August 6th, 1768, George Washington recorded the weather of that day: “Exceeding hot – & still till the Evening.” Sound familiar? Whether you visited Mount Vernon today or in the … Continue reading

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Thunder Bowls and Piss Pots

Abby Cliff/Graduate Student/SUNY Binghamton It is a truth universally acknowledged that in polite conversation, whether in the eighteenth century or the twenty first, one does not talk much about chamber pots, privies, or any related topic. Chamber pots were an … Continue reading

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Around the Artifact in 80 Seconds!

By Lara Howerton / Classics & Medieval Studies Major / 4th year/ University of Virginia Animated GIF.  Two little words that stir up fear in the heart of any internet denizen.  Well, not really fear, but at least memories of … Continue reading

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“I should be glad to have a label…”: George Washington’s Trunk Plate

By Laura Tancredi / Archaeology Laboratory Manager One of the most exciting finds from the South Grove Midden was a small brass trunk plate inscribed “Genl Washington”.  Personally-attributable artifacts are hard to come by in archaeology, so this trunk plate … Continue reading

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Beads, Beads, BEADS!

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online We found 240 beads in the South Grove Midden!  Of these, 224 of were complete and 16 were broken.  Remember the blog about soil processing methods?  Archaeologists pay lots of attention … Continue reading

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Archaeologists and Their Fascination with Beads

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online Beads are one of the more fascinating artifact types that historical archaeologists find, catalogue, analyze, and interpret.  They’re tiny, shiny, colorful artifacts worn on jewelry, around necks or dangling from ears, … Continue reading

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The Long and the Short of It (Tobacco Pipes, That Is)

Katie Barca / M.A. Anthropology / George Washington University About this time last June, I was working on my first blog about the tobacco pipes from the Midden. I had only been studying the tobacco pipes for a few months … Continue reading

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Of “midlg size & not Deep:” Milk Pans for the Every Man

By Eleanor Breen / Project Manager, Archaeological Collections Online While the 22 milk pans from the South Grove excavation provide important tangible details about the material and sizes, they are only a small fraction of George Washington’s milk pans.  The invoices … Continue reading

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