Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 17, 1994 TAG: 9407170052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN C. BOYLE The Progress-Index
DATELINE: PRINCE GEORGE (AP) LENGTH: Medium
"Garbage is very democratic," said Bob Wharton, executive director of the Flowerdew Hundred Foundation. "Everybody who has ever lived has made some."
For that, Wharton and the anthropology and archaeology students, from the University of Virginia and the University of California-Berkeley, are quite grateful. They're excavating a 70-by-20-foot site on the 1,400-acre property that English colonists settled in the early 1600s.
Heather Hotchkiss, a 20-year-old UVa student from Golden, Colo., laughed with excitement, holding up a tiny sliver of blue-and-white porcelain.
"It's tiny," she said, sweating and laughing equally hard as she handed the fragment up to Seth Malios, a graduate student studying anthropology at Virginia.
An aspiring specialist in colonial artifacts, Malios examined it carefully under the scorching sun. He explained that the fragment is a piece of Delftware, a type of china used by the early English residents.
Such finds, which are coming in at a steady rate this summer at Flowerdew, make the searing 95-degree heat and humidity a little more bearable.
A rising sophomore, Hotchkiss has just declared anthropology as her major. Flowerdew's "garbage" weighed heavily in the decision.
Located about three-quarters of a mile from the James River, the site she and the others are excavating shows evidence of several different uses spanning two centuries.
"It looks like what we have is a fairly rich deposit of household domestic trash," Wharton said, as he surveyed the checkerboard pattern the students have dug about 5 feet deep into the earth. "It looks as though the people were using this area to get rid of their kitchen waste. I sort of have the feeling that anything that was broken up in the house was put here, along with fireplace ash, food remains - the stuff of everyday life."
That "stuff" includes a wide range of material - 17th century silver-plated straight pins in remarkably good shape, tin-glazed earthenware, a silver button, animal bones, oyster shells, pottery fragments, Delftware chips - offering a view of the plantation's inhabitants.
Numerous bricks, apparently from a fallen chimney, line the bottom of the cellar the students are sifting through. Students also have uncovered pieces of plaster, indicating a house was located on the site at some point.
by CNB