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Story
The Great Tryon Palace Treasure Hunt
FOR NEARLY 50 YEARS, WE'VE RELIED ON ARCHAEOLOGY TO TEACH US ABOUT OUR PAST -
AND WE'RE NO THROUGH DIGGING YET
By Patricia Samford
Archa* -logy at Tryon Palace
1 ’ ; uric Sites Yt Gardens may not
be exactly like an Indiana Jones
movie— and thank goodness, since 20odd
years of digging have taken their toll on my
knees! Some days 1 find it difficult even to
climb out of deep excavation units, much
less wield a whip, fight off archaeological
bandits, and retrieve long-lost treasures.
Well, that part about finding treasures
isn’t entirely accurate. I’m always up for
finding buried pieces of the past, although
most of the things archaeologists uncover
don’t look like treasures to anyone else. We
get our share of broken plates, cups, and
bottles, cow bones from long-forgotten
meals, and iron nails so heavily corroded
you almost need x ray vision to identify
Throughout fall 2001 , volunteers dug outside
the William I lollister I louse in search of
information about its history.
them. These fragmented bits and pieces of
what looks like trash to most people
constitute a treasure trove of information
for archaeologists. At Tryon Palace Historic
Sites & Gardens, they're what enable us to
reconstruct New Bern’s past.
When visitors tour Tryon Palace’s
buildings, marvel at the antique
furnishings, and learn about 1 8th- and
1 9th-century life from our guides,
craftspeople, and character interpreters,
they are actually seeing just the tip of an
iceberg. The large and generally invisible
base of that iceberg is the historical,
architectural, and decorative arts
knowledge and scholarship that went into
creating those period settings and
interpretations. Archaeology, the study of
the past through objects and other
patterned remains that people leave
behind where they once lived and worked,
is a vital part of that base of knowledge.
Tryon Palace hired me as its first full¬
time archaeologist in May of 1 999. Three
days later 1 found myself codirecting a
search for the 18th-century Palace gardens,
with 20 novice Hast Carolina University
students as a field crew. But I was not the
first person to sink a trowel into Tryon
Palace’s fertile ground. The Palace’s
archaeological journey started almost 50
years ago, during the initial reconstruction.
Even then, archaeological exploration was
an important part of the Tryon Palace
Commission’s vision for reconstructing
the Palace and its grounds. In the early
stages of restoration, archaeological
excavation was used to locate the
underground foundations of the Palace
and its outbuildings. Morley Jeffers
Williams, former Harvard professor of
landscape architecture, was hired to
conduct these excavations, which occurred
between 1952 and 1955.
Unlike archaeology today, which
employs large-scale excavation using soil
color and texture changes to guide the
digging and recording of finds, field
methods in the 1 950s were more
minimalist. Digging a series of narrow,
evenly spaced trenches allowed
archaeologists to locate demolished
buildings quickly and efficiently. When a
trench intercepted a masonry foundation,
the workers would completely uncover t he
brick, removing all soil in the building
interior to look for evidence of partition
walls, hearth locations, and artifacts useful
in reconstructing the building. During
excavation, Williams and his crew located
the underground remains of the Palace, its
kitchen, colonnades, privies, an extensive
underground drainage system, and a well.
Unfortunately, this trenching technique
showed little regard for recovering crucial
information on dating the construction
and destruction dates of buildings, tor
analyzing how these buildings might have
been used or how they changed overtime.
♦
Archaeological research was also
viewed as an important tool fur
discovering traces of former
gardens and understanding historic
landscapes. Williams’ previous success at
finding archaeological traces of gardens at
Mount Vernon anil Stratford Hall made it
a reasonable expectation that he could find
the Palace gardens. I Jsing the same
trenching techniques that had proved
successful at locating the Palace, Williams
and his crew set out to uncover evidence of
planting beds, walkways, fence lines and
other landscape features.
Unlike the Palace foundations, however,
the landscape remains eluded the 1 950s
archaeologists. The problem lay in the
nature of the archaeological evidence.
Walkways would have been composed of
sand, marl, brick, crushed shell, or some
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Winter 2002
