This book provides the perspectives of five different authors, archaeologists who have dedicated a significant part of their careers to understanding life in the 17th and 18th century English colony of Maryland. The genesis of this volume was a desire on behalf of the Maryland Historical Trust to create a synthetic volume that was accessible to the general public and which would describe the rich history and cultural heritage of the State as revealed through archaeology. This material culture of past people and places provides a window into history that the written record cannot duplicate (or actively attempts to silence). Dozens of sites are examined, ranging from plantation manor homes and slave quarters, to courthouses and ordinaries. Moreover, the lives of those who built Maryland are explored, including not only the powerful elites who governed the colony, but also those whose land and labor were being exploited: Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and poor indentured servants. All of them shaped what became Maryland, and this book tells their story as revealed through the objects they left behind and the clues buried in the soil of our State.

This volume summarizes the remarkably diverse archaeological discoveries made during the past half century of investigations at the site of St. Mary’s City, the first capital of Maryland and one of the earliest European settlements in America. Founded in 1634, the city had disappeared by 1750, yet the archaeology documented in Unearthing St. Mary’s City reveals its untold history. Contributors to this volume review new research approaches and methods developed recently at Historic St. Mary’s City. They study the archaeology, architecture, and people of the lively seventeenth-century colonial hub. They also explore the landscapes of agriculture, enslavement, and remembrance that developed at the site in the centuries after the capital’s relocation to Annapolis. In their chapters, contributors delve into subjects such as soil analysis, ceramics, diet, forts, burials, plantations, state houses, tenants, tobacco pipes, gaming, and the education of women. The lands along the Chesapeake Bay have witnessed a vast range of human experiences, and this book highlights the lives of peoples of European, Native American, and African origins who lived on this site over a span of four centuries. Their stories illuminate the multilayered nature of this important place and the broader Chesapeake region and serve as a testament to the potential and power of historical archaeology. Contributors: Terry Peterkin Brock | Karin S. Bruwelheide | Charles H. Fithian | Silas D. Hurry | Stephen S. Israel | Robert Keeler | George L. Miller | Henry M. Miller | Ruth M. Mitchell | Alexander “Sandy” H. Morrison II | Douglas W. Owsley | Travis G. Parno | Timothy B. Riordan | Michelle Sivilich | Garry Wheeler Stone | Wesley R. Willoughby | Donald L. Winter

Bright white teeth. Straight leg bones. Awkwardly contorted arm bones. On a hot summer day in 2005, Dr. Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution peered into an excavated grave, carefully examining the fragile skeleton that had been buried there for four hundred years. "He was about fifteen years old when he died. And he was European," Owsley concluded. But how did he know? Just as forensic scientists use their knowledge of human remains to help solve crimes, they use similar skills to solve the mysteries of the long-ago past. Join author Sally M. Walker as she works alongside the scientists investigating colonial-era graves near Jamestown, Virginia, as well as other sites in Maryland. As you follow their investigations, she'll introduce you to what scientists believe are the lives of a teenage boy, a ship's captain, an indentured servant, a colonial official and his family, and an enslaved African girl. All are reaching beyond the grave to tell us their stories, which are written in bone.

This volume summarizes the remarkably diverse archaeological discoveries made during the past half century of investigations at the site of St. Mary's City, the first capital of Maryland and one of the earliest European settlements in America. Founded in 1634, the city had disappeared by 1750, yet the archaeology documented in Unearthing St. Mary's City reveals its untold history. Contributors to this volume review new research approaches and methods developed recently at Historic St. Mary's City. They study the archaeology, architecture, and people of the lively seventeenth-century colonial hub. They also explore the landscapes of agriculture, enslavement, and remembrance that developed at the site in the centuries after the capital's relocation to Annapolis. In their chapters, contributors delve into subjects such as soil analysis, ceramics, diet, forts, burials, plantations, state houses, tenants, tobacco pipes, gaming, and the education of women. The lands along the Chesapeake Bay have witnessed a vast range of human experiences, and this book highlights the lives of peoples of European, Native American, and African origins who lived on this site over a span of four centuries. Their stories illuminate the multilayered nature of this important place and the broader Chesapeake region and serve as a testament to the potential and power of historical archaeology.

The Maryland State Archives is the historical agency for Maryland. It serves as the central depository for state, county, and local government records which are to be kept forever. These include state executive, legislative, and judicial records; county probate, land, and court records; and some municipal records. Any government record created prior to April 28, 1788 (when Maryland ratified the U.S. Constitution), must, by law, be deposited at the State Archives. A multitude of records created after that date are also available either in their originally created form or in microform. Records are stored in a humidity- and temperature-controlled stack area, and preservation requirements, including deacidification, lamination, mylar encapsulation, and archival bookbinding, are carried out by the staff of an in-house conservation laboratory. Records are made accessible to the public in a search room open five days each week, through photocopies produced by an in-house photolab, and through the interlibrary loan of microform. The State Archives also maintains several special collections, including maps, photographs, church records, and newspapers. The books listed here represent but a small selection of Maryland materials published by or available from the Archives. In addition to other works in history, biography, records, and genealogy, the Archives offers historic maps, the state flag and seal in various forms, a paper preservation kit, the complete Archives of Maryland in microfilm, and more. Providence -- 1649 opens a fascinating window on the material culture of daily life in the seventeenth-century Puritan settlement on the Severn River. Using artifacts from Maryland and Dutchpaintings, this booklet reveals the significance of Dutch goods and building techniques in colonial Maryland.

In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches—archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical—to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines include the region’s vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary’s City, established as Maryland’s first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary’s City, for example, early on became the center of Maryland’s “founding narrative” of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area’s Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories. As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region’s more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research—particularly archaeological research—that produces new stories and “counter-narratives” that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past. Julia A. King is an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she coordinates the Museum Studies Program and directs the SlackWater Center, a consortium devoted to exploring, documenting, and interpreting the changing landscapes of Chesapeake communities. She is also coeditor, with Dennis B. Blanton, of Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region.

"This volume reproduces and assembles 19 papers authored by past and present staff members of Anne Arundel County, Maryland's Lost Town Project. These articles have all been published in the pages of Maryland Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Society of Maryland over the last 12 years. They represent results obtained from archaeological investigations at a number of colonial sites, ranging in date from circa 1650 until 1780, and in types from isolated farmsteads to urban taverns."--[Page i].