>> thank you so much for your time. >> thanks for yours. i really enjoyed it. >> for a dvd copy of this program, call 1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at qanda.org. "q and a" programs are also available as c-span podcasts. i was quite a radical as a young person and i was the one that thought that, you know,

the -- sing we shall overcome was really not a very effective way of gaining civil rights and i think that i thought that more confrontation was needed. >> economics professor, columnist and substitute host for rush limbaugh, walter williams, on being a radical. >> i believe that a radical is any person who believes in personal liberty and individual freedom and limited government. that makes you a radical. and i've always been a person who believed that people should not interfere with me. i should be able to do my own thing without -- so long as i don't violate the rights of the people. >> more with walter williams on c-span's "q and a." james madison, the fourth president of the united states, often referred to as the father of the constitution, owned about 100 slaves at montpelier, his 4,600-acre estate in orange county, virginia.

"american history tv" traveled 90 miles south of the nation's capital to learn about an archaeological project investigating the enslaved communities of james madison's montpelier, the three-year archaeology project is jointly funded by the foundation for the humanities and the montpelier foundation. >> i'm matthew reeves and i'm director of archaeology at mo montpelier. we're standing in the south yard, this is the area where the house slaves for the madisons lived and work and what we're in the middle of is an archeological investigation of this area. we first learned about the south yard through an insurance map dated to 1837. this is when dolley moves back to washington. she takes out an insurance policy on the house and part of what they need for this insurance policy is a plat showing where all the outbuildings are and we've outed this plat. this plat is incredibly

important allowing us to locate the outbuildings in this area. in the 1990s we located a chimney base, a brick chimney base, that we were able to figure out from the archaeology was part of a duplex or a slave quarter, with a central chimney and a hearth on either side, so there would be two households that would live there. with that we were able to line up the insurance plat with the rest of the grounds and able to start to explore this area for other outbuildings and what we found is that -- we've got three duplexes in this area. three homes for slave quarters, and four of these buildings we've marked. two smokehouses that are on the insurance map, a kitchen that's beside the house that's actually an 18th century kitchen that we located through archaeology and this other duplex which is one of three that we're going to be reconstructing. now, the timber frames that you see out here, these represent the size and the massings of

these buildings, give visitors an idea where the buildings are and how large they are. what we've done with these, the timber framing is authentic to the early 19th century, we had an historic architect willie graham who designed the timber frames based on a combination of the archaeology and contemporary timber frame technology of the time period, and what we've done with the timber frames we've just outlined the buildings with a framing because if we put on the siding, we don't have enough information to put on the siding, the windows and the doorways because we haven't done enough archaeology in this area. the second point with not doing archaeology in this area, if we put a roof and sidings on the buildings, it would have a wind load and we'd have to put in footers which would destroy the archaeology record. the archaeology below there can be excavated in the -- if we

need to, we can just take these buildings down and do the archaeology in this area. the reason why it's important we're doing this research and going to spending a year doing the archaeology on these particular quarters is, is we just recently restored the house. we spent about six to seven years doing the restoration of james and dolley madison's home, and one thing we're able to represent with the restored home is the space where james and dolley lived. and what we're able to show in the house with the basement areas and the service areas is where the slaves worked on a daily basis, but what we don't have represented is where the slaves had their homes and this is what we're doing with the excavations in the south yard and the timber frame outlines here is representing the bases. this is where the houses where they would have worked. it's where they would have served the roles that were expected of the madisons but

it's here in these spaces is what they called home, their daily lives, roles as mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, would have been in this area. to talk about it with the visitors to bring humanity to the people enslaved by the madisons we felt it was important to represent their homes in a physical way. because so many times when visitors come here, before we had the timber frames people would understand that madison had slaves, but to be able to understand what the slaves' daily life was like and they were part of a much larger community was very difficult to do without these structures being either investigated archeological or the actual timber frames in place. we've got an archaeology team at montpelier that works here full time. we also have field students during the summer. and during the fall and the spring we have what's called expedition programs where people come out for a week and work

side by side with the archaeoloar archaeologist and live on the property. this is a five foot by five foot square and the reason we do a five foot by five foot square is we want to know where all the items are coming from on the site. so by excavating the five foot by five foot square we can see where the objects are located, but also what we can do is all of the nails are mapped in with a laser transit and what you can see on the map right here that nicole has drawn is she's plotted in where all the arc facts are, but we also have drawings where features are such as this post hole and what we'll do is we'll put all of these maps together at the end of the excavation on autocad and produce overall site map of the entire project area. and then what we can do is relate that site plan to the larger landscape, where the fence lines are, how far this is from the mansion, how far it is

from other archeological features we've found. nice, it's like a platter. >> yeah. >> yeah. >> oh, yeah. yes. put this stuff out. >> they were all found stacked on top of each other. >> really? >> this. >> holy cow. >> and like this. >> this is decorated on the interior. >> and t >> this has got to be -- this looks like a chamber pot from the size of the foot ring. >> that makes my day, in a really sick way. so, it goes like this. >> but actually this pattern looks like a little bit later, like 1830s transfer decoration, which is still neat, it matches with -- >> and this has got a little guy on it. >> oh, yeah, a little cherub with a heart there, he's holding

a torch. >> super, super, super blue. >> that's more of the floral pattern, and, yeah, this one is really neat. >> so, it's real thick. and it's got this etching that's not painted, it's etching. >> that looks like some sort of table glass. >> yeah. >> but it's definitely leaded table glass. but maybe a large pitcher. this seems to be something that might have been broken in the house. in some cases, for example, we found pieces of a gravy boat it might be that the handle broke off the gravy boat and mrs. dolley, said, okay, that needs to leave the house, so the slave decides, do i throw this down slope in the trash deposit or can i reuse this? so it might be reacquired and reused. other cases it might be that something broke and the household inventory it happened the day before and, well, time to secret it away and have plausible denability until you

have the next inventory. one thing we're looking for is patterning. for example, if some of these items like this piece right here, this could be an item -- we haven't seen this piece in any of our excavations from the trash deposits of the madisons which is on the other side of the temple. we haven't seen this pattern, so it could be a piece that the slaves bought at market. and what we're interested in looking at are some of the broken madison broken household ceramics located in a different place than ceramics that the slaves purchased. if they are, it might support the case that if these are items when they're broken they are trying to keep these out of sight, out of mind. if they are all being deposited in this same place, maybe it's a factor of some items chipped in the house and no longer desirable for the table and they are being reused by the slaves. it's the larger stories that we are interested in that people a

surprised at is that slaves are a part of the market economy. not only were they chattel property, but they were also selling small produce, small items to the madisons' neighboring planters and using that cash or a barter system to buy their own house ohold goods. we are thinking more and more thatves re responsible of purchasing things in their own houses for their own means. this was a way that we can see how different groups the slaves might have had different access to market goods, meaning they had more disposable income per se through marketing their own items or had, you know, different status within the community. and used their position within the labor structure to exert authority over other slaves. and these are the kind of relationships we're hoping to build from, you know, studying the trash we're finding here in the slave quarters and build a much larger and more complete picture of, you know, what the slave community was like.

the the folks that lived here with more than just property, they were human beings, they had families and they had relationships with each other and that's what we're trying to reconstruct here. what we can see we're excavating here is we're in between these two buildings. you've got a corner of a building right here. you can see the corner that's right here. you go 16 feet over in this direction. you've got another brick corner that's located right here, and then on this other side, we found brick piers up in these locations, but it gives us evidence that this structure was 16x32 feet. now, this would have been -- would have had brick footers, but this structures would have been a wooden building with wooden fill, similar to the one we've reconstructed with the other structures, and then this is the base of the chimney stack. this stack would have been brick you at way up through the top of the roof, and this little indent

here is where the hearth would have been located. now, we don't have any evidence for a hearth or actually where the slaves would do their cooking on a daily basis. this hearth was probably built up off the ground because there's no evidence of burning in this area, which means this structure would have had a raised wooden floor, which is very different than most early 19th century slave quarters of the time period, and it gives us an idea of the structures that were in the south yard were actually built to be seen by visitors. they're a little more resources put into these structures than we finding in slave quarters in other areas of the property. this is the second duplex structure. this one is a little bit different from that one in terms of how it was built. this one had a stone chimney base, so, again, you would have had two households in this duplex. one would have had a space 16x16 foot here and would have had a hard th

hearth that would have been inside this chimney and on the other side there was another hearth here and you would have had a raised wooden floor and there was a 16x16 space for another household and there probably would have been anywhere from four to six people living in each one of these spaces, so total you've got maybe 10 to 12 people in one of these duplexes. you've got three of those, so you're looking at maybe 25, 30 people in this area. alternatively one of the duplexes could have been used by when visitors came to see the madisons, they were bringing their personal slaves and coachmen and a number of folks serving them, they would have needed a place to stay. maybe it was servant guesthousing. it's hard to say. it's been seen on other plantations in the time period. with the excavations what you see here is the completed excavation of this site. we've excavated all the structural remains that were

that had feature soil. we've excavated yard surfaces and what happens to all the artifacts is each one of these units, each of these 5x5 units are excavated separately. each strata within each unit is kept separate and all of the items are taken down to the lab for processing. there you go. this is a piece of -- ah, very cool. this is, like -- it's a piece of glass, bottle glass, but it's either melted or -- it looks like there's molded flasks. they're very, very thin glass. that's really neat. i haven't seen one of these in a long time. but it's clear. i bet it's some of that flask-type glass. the archaeology lab is a short walk down the hill from the mansion, and we have it open to the public. visitors come down. see artifacts we've found at the

site, previous ceramics we restored into whole vessels. in the lab what we've got is two different areas. we've got a working deck where we process and power wash all our rock and brick that we recover from the site. and what we also have is water screening station where we take the soil samples that we bring back here and instead of putting them through the quarter-inch screen like we do at the site, we wash it through window screen. and what you can see helen doing right here is she's washed down some of the soil through this window screen and you can see all the small artifacts that are coming out, fish bone, eggshell, straight pins, smaller pieces of ceramics and glass that would be lost at the site. so, there's some elements, some groups of artifacts that we would never recover if we didn't go through this process. what we do is we soak the soil in these buckets of water, and

what happens is all the sediment sink to the bottom. that's what helen is water screening right now. but then the charred wood floats to the top, and we skim that charred wood off, because what we find with the charred wood, in this case, you see the specks of charred wood right here, and the smaller black flecks which are potentially not just charred wood, but also charred seeds. we dry this, wash it, dry it, and then send it off to a paleo botanist, and what she says, she's able to identify the wild -- some of the smaller seed specimens that can't be seen with the naked eye, so what we're able to get from this is more evidence in this case about the slaves' diet, not only the bones from the kind of animals they were eating but also evidence of what kind of plat material they were processing as well, so with this what we try to do at the site is recover every bit of information from the soil.

and sometimes that's information that you can't see with just the naked eye, and it takes, you know, some further processing. thanks, ellen. >> you have to put a card for that. >> no, i put our own for rounded because it's been touched by -- washed up off of it. because once it gets wet. >> as i mentioned, all these artifacts come down to the lab, and they're washed, sorted, and then cataloged and then eventually restored. and this is an example of some of the units that we've recovered from the south yard. these are actually units that

we're working on just this past week, and when we close out that level, this is 1907 which is one of the five foot by five foot squares, this is layer "c," which is the occupation layer it has all the trash remains from the slave household, ceramics here. this is a piece of transfer printed willow wear. you can identify the pattern from the edge here and the pattern right here. these are the artifacts. here's a wine bottle fragment. the class weglasswares can be w. we use a toothbrush to clean them. if you submerge this in water, it's going to destabilize the iron and it's going to begin to corrode at the items that are more diagnostic, the iron items that are more diagnostic, we

conserve. this appears to be part of maybe a five blade, for cutting grass, a large size. and this is the blade portion and it's just corroded away in this area. but if we didn't conserve these items, what would eventually happen to them being out of the ground, the rust would accelerate and eventually fall apart. what we do is we put them in these conservation tanks where we run electric current through a solution of baking soda, and it fluffs all the iron rust off it until you get down to the bare metal. the next step in the conservation is to use a dremel tool to clean off the remaining rust. then they're washed in a solution of distilled water, boiled in distilled water. baked in the oven to dry it and also dipped in acetone to dry off any more water and they are coated with a conservation coating to keep the oxygen off

the object. some of these iron objects potentially were -- if they're here on an 18th century site were made here on the property, so we could have objects such as this hinge that were made by the slave named moses who headed up the blacksmith shop for james madison's father. these are objects, again, that tell, you know, a much larger story about, you know, just what they were, but about the plantation society that was here and everything from how it was used to how it was made, so we artifacts after hese in the they have been washed. these are excavations from four strata from four different units and you can see the nails after they've been dry brushed. the ceramics now they're clean. you can see the paste color. you can see the glaze. and what occurs once they're cleaned is they are bagged by artifact type.

for example, the ceramics are separated from the nails and the glass are put into another bag. the bone is put into another one. all these go over to the boxes over here where what we'll be doing this winter is cataloging all these artifacts. we've got staff and interims doing it right now. we are cataloging all the rock and brick from the site. so, you can see charlie's about to dump out one of the sample bags here. and where is that one from, charlie? >> southwest yard. >> southwest yard. and that's 18 -- >> 91. >> so, the unit and what emma's doing is she's separating what we call architectural material by type. she's separating the brick and also looking at how soft the brick is by marking it on the paper, the soft oven fired brick. you can see what jessica's doing over here is she's taking the water screen sample after it's

been washed and dried and it's been floated, so the light fraction is separated from the heavy fraction, she's doing what is called gradating. she's putting it through grad e gradated screen, the half-inch is separated from the quarter-inch, all the half-inch material is cataloged, but then these remaining screens are separated. she measures the volume so we can get an idea of the constituent sediments that are in the soils. but then all these will be picked for artifacts. as you can see little bits of ceramic here. also there's bits of window glass. but the real exciting part comes when -- especially on the window screen is sometimes you'll identify small beads, straight pins. these are all items that were put through the quarter-inch screen at the site would be gone. we'd never be able to recover

and we'd never know they were thi there. the next stem is cataloging there. what pam and kim are doing is cataloging. that a neat one right there. that's probably part of a teapot lid. that's a piece of glazed refined red wear. i've never seen the top with a hole in it. i don't know if they would have, like, a tea screen or a ball which would put through here. >> oh, yeah. oh, yeah. >> that's gorgeous. that's -- yeah, steam. they didn't have tea bags then so -- but what tim and pat are doing is they are separating these ceramics by type, so, for example, these are, you know, originally when they came out of the unit, these two pieces weren't together. there's actually three pieces here. but what they found is these three pieces actually mend, so

these will be cataloged in one line. this is this same transfer print pattern that katie found out in the field yesterday, that this brown transfer print. this is actually part of a plate, though, what she had found looked to be part of a larger pot, maybe a chamber pot. the back of the plate is, of course, undecorated, but the front has this transfer print on. that's beautiful. they write these up on this catalog sheet and each unique occurrence gets its own line. in this case, this is the jagged pattern porcelain that they recovered found from one of the other bags. each ceramic shard is weighed on a scale in grams, measured, and eventually what happens to all this data, it gets entered into a computer database where you can analyze, for example, where are all the brown transfer prints ceramics from the site and what's their total weight or what's the total weight of all

the ceramics from the southwest slave quarter as compared to the southeast slave quarter or the distribution by weight of ceramics all across the sites. >> flowers or -- >> here is kind of the creme de la creme of the artifacts we recovered this summer, ranging from this bottle glass part of a flask. you can see this grape design right here. this is just a beautiful example of a piece of embossed glass bottled from the an18th century. part of an iron padlock. this is the body of the padlock. this is the bail. this is the hinge right there and it would swing back and forth and the key would enter right there. and then we found four navy buttons. these two are officers' buttons. but these date to the late 1820s, early 1830s.

we're not sure why they're in the slave quarter, but it's a mystery that needs to be solved. this is part of a pharmaceutical vial right here. and most interestingly, we recovered just this past week we recovered what is a real or a spanish coin that dates to 1801. and what's interesting about this coin is oit clip it's clip. there are little pieces taken out here. that's actually an illegal practice by sommmere merchants. it's some direct evidence that slaves are engaged in marketing activities. they were, you know, selling items to either the madisons to their guests or neighboring slave owners or neighboring

community members to obtain cash or barter to obtain some of the items you see right here. some of the other items we've got evidence for, you know, the kind of food the slaves were eating. this is a -- this is a pig bone or a small cow bone, i'm not sure what this is. but it's been cracked for the marrow. might have been used for a soup. and this little guy, this is a figurine head, and this one potentially has an interesting history, we're researching right now. it seems to be a seder, you can see the pointed ears like mr. spock there, looks to be some kind of figurine from greek mythology. maybe when this broke, you know, some child found the little head interesting and brought it back to the quarter. it's hard to say. a number of stories you can figure from these. the last set of analysis we do

with the ceramics and glassware is actually take the shards and once they're labeled, they've been cataloged and they're labeled is to spread them out over a table and mend them back together and restore them. this is an example of a piece of bamboo stone china that was recovered from dolley's midden. this is the trash deposit from the madisons' retirement years, downlo downslope, before we mend this, we label each shard so we know exactly where it came from. this is the site number, 44, state of virginia, "o" is orange county, 249 is the mansion site and had is the inventory number, 10208, that's how we figure what unit it came from, this catalog number ax, matches up with one of the individual catalog lines that you saw kim and pat writing up previously. and this actually is a back mark that allows us to know it