Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is a major historic building in Charlottesville, but its grounds are also an active archeological site, where teams work to uncover the stories of enslaved people and ancestral Monacan in the area. Now, visitors can tour these sites themselves through this year’s Plantation Archaeology Walking Tour. To learn more, we spoke with Crystal O’Connor, an archeologist at Monticello. This interview has been edited for length.
What do you do at Monticello? I’m the archaeological field research manager, so I run and direct all of the archaeological fieldwork that takes place on the property. I’m out excavating, sometimes year-round, and recording layers of dirt that we see, collecting artifacts, and then getting that information back to our lab and our lab staff.
What makes working at Monticello different than working at some of these other historic sites? I think the landscape is one unique aspect of Monticello that other historic sites don’t have—the ornamental landscape, the agricultural working farm. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation owns half of Jefferson’s original 5,000 acres, so it’s a really unique opportunity to get to learn about the landscape in a way that other historic sites don’t or can’t because there’s subdivisions or housing developments that have gone up around their properties. We also have Jefferson. No other site has Jefferson, and to be able to study his architecture and the buildings that he had constructed is fascinating. And then I think we also have a really unique resource in our cataloging system, which is called DAACS. It’s the digital archaeological archive of comparative slavery. And it’s an online database that we put all of our records that we generate in the field into and all of our artifacts. Monticello gives us a really unique opportunity to learn about slavery in a way that other historic sites just aren’t quite there.
These walking tours that started, is this the first time that these have been available? Or has this been available previously? This is the second year of the archaeology department collaborating with the education department. [The guide team has] taken the materials that we’ve written and have added stories that help paint the picture a little better of what slavery was like here at Monticello during the time of the revolution. The tour ends at a site that dates to the 1770s and 1780s.
What path does the trail take and what can people look forward to? The walk travels down a historic roadway that enslaved laborers built probably in the early 19th century, and it’s a pretty level path. It’s downslope of Monticello, so the tour doesn’t visit the main house, or the mountaintop. We walk through what are now woods, but were once agricultural fields. This area was occupied by ancestral Monacan prior to European colonization. Slavery is something we’ve interpreted for decades at Monticello, but the pre- contact component is something that we’re hoping we can share with visitors more broadly with a visit to this site. [The Monocans’] ancestral homeland is about an hour south of here in Amherst County. Working collaboratively with them and working collaboratively with descendants through the Getting Word program here at Monticello, descendants of people whom Jefferson enslaved, it’s been a really rewarding experience to make this project and this tour collaborative.
For more information on the tours, which run through November, visit monticello.org.