Lily Carhart, Curator of Preservation Collections, George Washington’s Mount Vernon In 2019 while cataloguing and photographing artifacts from recent excavations at George Washington’s Mount Vernon in the area south of the Kitchen outbuilding, a member of the archaeology team identified a tobacco pipe stem stamped with an elaborate coat of arms. This discovery started a multiyear journey into studying the …
Curator’s Curio: Cooking with the Trammel
Karen McIlvoy, Archaeology Laboratory Supervisor for Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest The technology to safely cook over an open flame is very old. Cooking pots and utensils with long handles, Dutch ovens, trivets, tongs, and other tools were all used to ensure that cooks were able to prepare food without hurting themselves. One of the tools used that we rarely hear …
Curator’s Curio: An Unusual Porcelain Wine Cup
Beth Bollwerk, Project Manager for the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) Welcome back to COVA’s Curio Corner – a quarterly feature where we highlight a particularly interesting artifact, or artifact type, from an archaeological project in Virginia. This Corner’s artifact – a Chinese Porcelain wine cup that dates to the first half of the 17th century – comes …
Curator’s Curio: Lucky Coin
Caroline Gardiner, Veteran’s Curation Program “What’s the date for our coin?” “1790s.” “They have the same one.” In 2021, the Veterans Curation Program (VCP) in Alexandria received a 260-box collection from the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Norfolk District’s Gathright Dam/Lake Moomaw project. The Dam is located in west-central Virginia about 40 miles from Staunton. The area’s history covers …
Curator’s Curio: Once in a Blue Moon
Web Editor’s Note: The Curator’s Curio is a quarterly research brief highlighting interesting or unusual finds from archaeological collections throughout Virginia. Tatiana Niculescu, Alexandria Archaeology In 1977, archaeologists working on the 500 block of King Street in Alexandria were racing the clock and the bulldozers to recover the remains of the port city’s past. Deep in the bowels of a …