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Tag: William & Mary

What does it mean to construct an archaeological database?  

Published March 30, 2022

By Caroline Watson, Anthropology Graduate Assistant, 2019-present

Database is a bodiless concept, recognizable to many but whose boundaries are difficult to define. Most broadly, our minds and memories are databases that constantly update, however imperfectly, as we see, read, and experience new things. In the scholarly sense, databases are paper or digital places that store key details of a person, object, location, or event. Both of these definitions underscore that databases are sources of information and a central home to multiple types of data that derive from other, diverse sources. Recognizing the form and function of databases is indeed a first step in learning how to think about them critically.  

Caroline Watson and the in-progress database

One labor of love The Lemon Project is currently undertaking is the construction of an archaeological database, which I am helping to design as part of my graduate research fellowship. This database will host information relating to the findings from archaeological excavations that have taken place on William & Mary’s campus since the 1930s. In other words, it will be a lengthy and descriptive list of artifacts that have been found on campus. Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to populate this database with every individual artifact that has been unearthed over the past almost century. Norms and regulations surrounding both artifact documentation and preservation of excavation forms have changed over the decades, thankfully now holding archaeologists more accountable for their work. To this end, the task of tracking down the artifact inventories that are dispersed throughout different archaeological companies and organizations has been a challenge in itself and is still ongoing. William & Mary itself houses archaeological and documentary collections that are independent from collections that reside in specific departments, making it all the more complicated to round up and access these data. Once I obtain artifact inventories from archaeological reports, I face the difficulty of standardizing this information into our own database-specific categories. This requires the creation of a standardized system of codes and categories that I will apply to all artifact entries. It is important to recognize the role personal judgment plays here. These codes and categories directly determine the type of information we are extracting from each artifact, and thus the extent of future knowledge about that object. If I decided to label every pottery sherd (not shard!) as simply ceramic, I would miss the crucial distinctions between styles like stoneware, pearlware, and Chinese porcelain, which each have their own temporal and geographic implications. Alternatively, recording every possible detail of an artifact may paralyze the progress of database construction and result in a mass of data that is not necessarily useful to anyone. Navigating this fine line is my current job as someone designing the database. My approach has been to think critically about what details of artifacts are most relevant and can answer the widest variety of research questions, now and in the future. Certainly, The Lemon Project intends for this database to not only spotlight that William & Mary has its own archaeological collections, but also engage future archaeological research projects that highlight the presence of enslaved peoples on campus and focus on the materiality of enslaved life ways and experiences.

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Meet Derek Vouri-Richard, LP American Studies Graduate Assistant

Published March 23, 2022

By Derek Vouri-Richard, 2021-2022 American Studies Graduate Assistant

I am a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at William & Mary. My areas of specialization are media studies, visual culture studies, cultural studies, film studies, the history of American capitalism, and the history of American media. My research looks at the ways in which American businesses were developing new forms of literacy and visual learning in the first half of the twentieth century. My research and areas of specialization relate to the Lemon Project in that I am interested in the ways in which developing market relations intersect with cultural dynamics such as race and gender. My role in the Lemon Project involves researching with documents that reveal enslaved people who were associated with the college from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. These documents come from sources connected to William & Mary and sources outside the college. William & Mary documents that have helped the Lemon Project better understand the ways in which slavery has shaped the college’s history include bursar account records, faculty minutes books, former president’s account books, and ephemeral material such as a list of slaves owned by the college from the eighteenth century. Sources outside of William & Mary that have contributed to the Lemon Project research include the Bruton Parish Church, the Virginia Gazette, the William and Mary Quarterly, and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. Through accumulating these sources the Lemon Project hopes to build a comprehensive database that will facilitate ongoing knowledge about the history of race and slavery at William & Mary and in Williamsburg.

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Get to know the Lemon Project Anthropology Graduate Assistant

Get to know the Lemon Project Anthropology Graduate Assistant

Published March 9, 2022

By Caroline Watson, Anthropology Graduate Assistant, 2019-present

Receiving the Lemon Project research fellowship in Fall 2019 was one of the reasons I was most excited to attend William & Mary as an incoming master’s student in archaeology. At that time, I couldn’t have predicted that I’d be continuing with the Lemon Project team 3 years later as a doctorate student! Although my Ph.D. research is focused on pre-contact chiefdoms in French Polynesia (think 14th to 18th century), I was equally eager to dive into a project that highlighted the archaeology of the more recent past, especially that of the university and community into which I was entering. Since my very first day working with the Lemon Project team, I have never thought of my work as simply fulfilling the requirements for my fellowship. Rather, I am deeply engaged in and committed to the Lemon Project’s goals of broadening our knowledge of William & Mary’s history with slavery as well as using this research to build a safer, more inclusive community within the university and beyond. 

As an archaeologist, I am tasked with the attempt to understand William & Mary’s history of slavery through a material lens. While archaeologists certainly utilize the archival record, what sets us apart from other disciplines is our attention to the materiality of history—the objects, architecture, and even soil stains that people leave behind. A place like William & Mary has never really been abandoned. For one, indigenous peoples resided in this space long before the College’s formation in 1693, and even the brief hiatus in an academic administrative presence during the Civil War still saw an active occupation of the campus landscape (Higgins III 2014: 15). Nevertheless, while many buildings remain grounded in the same location, the areas in between them have been constantly renovated and re-designed over the years, through renovation and landscaping projects. The Sunken Gardens, for instance, were not constructed until 1935, which raises questions about what occupied that area before all that earth was moved. All of this makes it pretty difficult to get a direct “snapshot” of what campus looked like during the years it was engaged in the practice of slavery, since we have to peel back several layers of these physical changes. 

Documentation of archaeological work performed on campus since the 1930s helps us get closer to the material and architectural history of 18th and 19th century William & Mary, in the hopes of gaining a fuller understanding of the context in which enslaved peoples worked and lived here. Thus, my principal work as the Lemon Project Anthropology Graduate Fellow is to work directly with these documents and build a database that stores their information and makes this material history accessible to all. Stay tuned for more detail about this database! 

Sources Cited:
Higgins III, T.F. (2014). The Civil War at William and Mary: Archaeological Data Recovery in the Brafferton and Wren Yards, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research. WMCAR Project No. 12-19.

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