Behind the towering Live Oak trees in the Savannah suburb of Georgetown, crews of archaeologists recently unearthed the brown and red dirt for signs that slaves once lived there. They found physical evidence of how slaves on the Miller Plantation lived and the tools they used around the kitchen in everyday life, including fragments of dishes, white and blue ceramics and green glass.
Such artifacts can breathe life into the pages of history, says Daina Ramey Berry, a scholar of American slavery at the University of Texas in Austin who has studied slavery in the region.
“For me as a historian, I learn more about slavery from a toilet or a trash pit. I can use the archaeological report as a physical record. It’s very powerful,” Berry said.
The archaeological discovery by the Georgia Department of Transportation was triggered by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, a federal law that requires archaeological digs on public land in historically significant areas. The landowner in this case is the Georgia DOT, which purchased the property from a private landowner for a highway project known as the Abercorn Extension.
If not in the hands of the state, the wooded area, which sits along Highway 204 next to a newly built apartment complex and convenience store, may likely be bulldozed and developed.
Rita Elliott, the public archaeologist for One South Associates, the company hired to do the dig for the Georgia DOT, told a group of college students from Georgia Southern University recently that the company sectioned off about 20-acres using X-ray-type technology to spot potential structures. They were given a few months and limited resources to survey the land and to unearth what they could before the highway construction project begins.
