GREAT Site! I highly recommend it!  We have been visiting the Mount Vernon website for the past year now and found the information to be very professional and useful.

Bill Liebeknecht, MA, RPA
Hunter Research, Inc.
Trenton, New Jersey

-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eleanor Breen
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 3:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: New Resource for 18th-century Material Culture

Mount Vernon's Archaeology
Department has just launched a new web resource (www.mountvernonmidden.org) devoted to artifacts excavated from a rich, pre-Revolutionary War domestic deposit associated with the Washington households and the enslaved individuals who lived and worked around the mansion.  This website (designed by Mark Freeman of Stories Past) was created to digitize, showcase, and contextualize artifacts excavated from the South Grove Midden site.  The heart of this website is a searchable database of over 700 objects   complete with photographs, detailed summaries, and catalogue information   connected to a rich body of documentary and thematic material.  On the Archaeology section, you can learn more about the history of the archaeological site and see images of the excavations.  Under History, the timeline provides access to important primary documents.  Additionally, two historical databases, George Washington s invoices and orders and Alexander Henderson s schemes of goods, are located in this section and allow for extensive exploration of the consumer revolution.  These two databases allow users to compare the consumer goods available to and necessary for the success of a large-scale plantation like Mount Vernon with the types of merchandise available at the local store to small-scale planters, tradesmen, and enslaved individuals.  Links under Context provide specific studies of artifact sub-assemblages like fans, buttons, and dairying artifacts that integrate the documentary evidence from the two databases.  Theme pages allow visitors to explore how archaeological material culture contributes to our understanding of significant topics in colonial American including: gentility; slavery; gender; and consumerism.  The About sections gives a photographic project history and provides links to publications and reports.

If you use the website, we d appreciate your feedback, especially as we prepare for our second phase of the Archaeological Collections Online initiative!  Thanks, Eleanor

Eleanor Breen, MA, RPA
Deputy Director for
Archaeology
Historic Mount Vernon
PO Box 110
Mount Vernon, VA 22121
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