Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 3, 1990 TAG: 9004030200
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONICA DAVEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FOREST LENGTH: Medium
A guide warns visitors to resist the urge to pick up the broken objects once they walk behind that window. Though they look like random piles, the clusters are meticulously organized - based on where they were found in the depths of Thomas Jefferson's back yard.
Archaeologists spent last summer excavating 55,000 artifacts from Jefferson's Bedford County summer home, and it is here - in a 75-year-old barn on the grounds that has been transformed into a high-tech laboratory - that the archaeologists will clean, repair, catalog and analyze the objects.
Unlike most laboratories, the one at Jefferson's Poplar Forest will allow visitors to watch the archaeloogical process at work by watching through the red barn's picture window.
Visitors will see that archaeology is more than just digging in a field, Poplar Forest executive director Lynn Beebe told a group of officials gathered for the laboratory's formal opening Monday.
Once an area is dug up, the tasks needed to make sense of the uncovered objects are immense. "We try to figure out what it is, the date of manufacture, where it's from and who bought it," said lab supervisor M. Drake Patten.
Three lab workers will number each piece of each object and some items, like ceramic pots and glass bottles, will be mended.
Before the objects even make it into the barn's front room, they have to be cleaned. "Some things are so corroded you don't even know what you've got," Patten said.
In the barn's back room, a dirt-covered nail, latchkeys and horseshoe hang from a wire into a tub of liquid. It looks like an old-fashioned process, but it's anything but that.
Ultrasonic waves are slowly shaking years of dirt off the objects. The cleaning, which can take one or many days, beats scientists' old method which Patten describes as "a toothbrush on everything."
In the hallway, a computer records what the lab workers learn. It will store maps of areas that have been excavated, drawings and photos of what was found there along with information gathered by researchers who have analyzed Jefferson's written documents.
Members of the public can view the laboratory 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays from April to October. Weather permitting, they also can watch excavation.
Come May, digging will begin again at Poplar Forest. Last year, workers uncovered a wing of the estate, added in 1814, and a wine cellar in the octagonal-shaped house Jefferson built in 1806. This year, they will focus on features of the landscape and possible other outbuildings.
Officials don't know how long it will take to excavate everything they want to at Poplar Forest and piece together the information they learn from those digs - to eventually restore Jefferson's retreat.
The archaeological process, says Patten, "is almost never done."
by CNB