Sustainability. He received his phd from the college of william and mary. In 2008 he gained International Attention as part of the team that found the remains of George Washingtons childhood farm at ferry farm. He recounted it in his 2013 book where the cherry tree grew the story of ferry farm, George Washingtons boyhood home. His 2015 book, which i have right here in my hand, is called George Washington written upon the land. We have three copies in the bookstore if youre interested in purchasing one of them later. This book explores the many retellings of washingtons much fabled childhood and covers things ranging from biography to archaeology to environmental history. He is currently writing the archaeology of George Washington a survey of all the washingtonrelated sites and their stories. He has also conducted a reassessment of the 1930s archaeological record at George Washingtons birthplace. He says this site is one of the most intriguing and misunderstood archaeological sites. He says it is time to fully make sense of the birthplace, archaeologically speaking, the last place of the puzzle. He will be speaking on the finding of his 2013 reassessment of the sites archaeology and will highlight the things generations have gotten right and wrong. He argues, since the anniversary of the birth is fast approaching, those of us who are committed to the landscape will want it to speak loudly and clearly about the momentous event that took place nearly 300 years ago. The world will be watching. Without further ado, please welcome dr. Philip levy. [applause] dr. Levy thanks, everyone, thanks for coming out here. Lets get everything set up. Thanks for being here. Thank you, scott, for the introduction and to the superintendent for helping pull this together. Can you hear me ok . Im not sure what you can hear. I have got two mikes. I can talk really loudly, so maybe i will just ignore the microphones and talk at a higher volume, which is pretty normal. The microphones will have to sort of do their balance game and we will see where we end up. The introduction gave little bit of a tip of things im going to talk about and give away one of my punchlines, but thats ok. I like to put these up because this contextualizes why im the one talking about this. For the past decade or more, i have been interested in washingtons childhood and the landscapes of his childhood. That means that my field of study has become washington memory, the way that washington is used as a figure another discussions. It is in some ways inspired by archaeology. When you dig a site, you have the layers you are most interested in, the period you are trying to get at, but you also have responsibility for every other period along the way. I approached this landscape study in a similar way. It is about washington in the 1930s, 1960s, 1860s, these different areas where washington is used in different ways. This has become very important to me and it stems from an archaeological beginning. Im an archaeologist as well as a historian. I like to look at the sites and work from them, using the sites as my framework. I put the number 2032 up. Why . Can anybody guess what is special about the number . This is probably the worst audience to ask this question because you know. You know what is coming next. This. Does this clarify a little of what you already knew i was talking about . This is an essential thing we have to keep in mind. We are, in planning terms 2032 is 10 minutes away. It takes a very long time to organize the kind of scale of event that will have to happen. Washingtons bicentennial, which was central in the creation of this park, was an event that was planned for about 20 years. By the point we are at in relation to the tricentenniary, the president had already said there would be an event. We want to beat the drums on this a little bit. All of you can help by being loyal to the landscape and helping spread the idea there has to be something. There will be something. Somebody will figure out that 2032 is coming upon us, it is just a question of when. Hopefully we can get this in mind so we can get something solid and powerful and focused on this landscape that brings people and resources to the community that is a benefit to everybody. We can do it well or poorly. I think we can do it well, but we have to recognize this is happening and we want to turn the 300 anniversary into Something Interesting and substantive. The bicentennial was crucial in the formation of this landscape, not in a geological sense, but the preservation movements born in the 1920s here became all came together and became a crucial piece of the making of the park here in 1932. The federal projects, the federal government had involvement, but it produced an enormous amount of literature, art, and Public Awareness about washington, which is still studyable. It is a fascinating record. It is central to the story here. The park is one major outcome. This is a community i dont need to use this map with, but it is still worth highlighting. I used this map at a talk overseas wants. That was pretty pointless. The potomac river. Does not always work. We know where we are, halfway up the potomac. We are in the core of old settlement. One of the things emerging in the broader scholarship are the differences between the virginia region. Instead of a single virginia colony, we are Getting Better at thinking about how some regions function. We are seeing the potomac with maryland on one side and virginia on the other as a region. This is the landscape we will focus in on, the landscape that came into focus in the 1920s and 1930s. This is a satellite photo. Do i have a pointer . I can use this. There we go. The point of land here. This all should be pieces you are familiar with. The Memorial House, curved walkway, outline of building x, reconstructed outbuildings. We cant really see the visitors center, but somewhere down here close to where we are. There is a third point of land further down, the day, and the potomac beyond. This is our landscape where we are going to focus and talk about the way this place has been understood and misunderstood. As background, as we approach 2032, a lot of different discussions began. Five years ago, one of them was about the need to understand the archaeological record here under the previous superintendent, who understood the importance. We were able to find the money to do a reassessment of the 1930s archaeological record. That is the first step. Before anything else, we need to understand what that record looks like. The 1930s, as many of you know, is a considerably long time ago, and much of the world has changed. We dont operate archaeologically the same way we did in the 1930s. A lot of the conclusions we would come to now. Some of the most fundamental pieces of the way archaeologically works are radically different. We have ceramic dating down to a science in the way they did not. They can define people, define sites, define things that bring up from the ground as colonial era china. We can get very precise dates for when ceramics are first manufactured, precise information about when they entered american market. We are able to treat ceramics as a diagnostic tool, something to help us date our sites with a degree of precision unavailable in the 1930s. Architecturally, you would not think this, but we know more about colonial architecture now than they did in the 1930s. There are classes of buildings they were unaware that existed. It has taken archaeology of the 1970s and 1980s to look at them. We have changed our understanding radically. The people who were doing excavating in the 1930s, the best knowledge they had did not know that post in ground buildings existed. They know there can be farmed buildings, but they did not know anything about post in ground dwelling. They did not have any way to identify them. Theyre not excavating sites in a way that will let them find them. The only way they know how to find them are bricks in situ, bricks in the ground. They can do that really well, but they dont have the ability or document set, data set, to be able to bring much to bear on that. They can identify buildings, but dont have the acumen to understand them. That is both a good and bad thing and part of why it is so important to do this reassessment and begin a discussion of what this site actually says. The bad part would be there is a lot of uncertainty about the archaeological record. That happens over time. The good part is that a lot of the site, the bulk of the site, is largely unexcavated. There is a lot we dont know about. It is waiting for a time when we have digital methods at our disposal to be able to do minimal impact to understand what is on the ground. In many ways, it has worked out well. It is almost like theyre waiting for the 300th anniversary to come along. That is a pretty exciting thing when you start to take apart this site, and you will see why by the time im done. Im going to show you different slides and imagery, some of which is fairly technical, but i have chosen some small examples and i think i can talk you through them. I want to highlight one other thing you need to keep in mind when understanding the story of this place. Many of you know the story. There is a lot written about it and you can track it down without much effort. In the 1930s, there are competing groups of people are arguing people are doing Different Things about this landscape. Each side is making its case, and they are focused on 19th century data in order to make that case. There also were people in the public ether who were arguing this was not the birthplace site at all. That argument does not really get traction but it appears in the washington post, the new york times. There are people arguing in that period that both groups that are arguing the wakefield association and ultimately National Park service and they are both wrong and it is not here at all. That debate is not a debate. We have absolute certainty. It would be impossible to imagine this is not the right landscape. But they were nervous in that time period that it might not be, so some of the defensiveness you see in the debates in the 1920s and 1930s is because other people are arguing, you are both wrong. You see politics emerging in the discussion. Another thing to keep in mind i am laying out these pillars so we have a handle on why the changes im talking about are part of this and why they fit together these days, the average undergraduate history student has access to literally thousands more documents 24 hours a day than the best american historian had in 1925. That is an astounding thing to keep in mind. When people were doing their histories in the 1930s, they had the material they had in front of them, but that is what they had. It was difficult to get more. You do find people who are very thorough, but thorough does not look the same then as now. We have the ability through Digital Media and collections work over the past century, we have access to an incredibly large amount of information that we are able to bring to bear that they simply could not. I spent a lot of time for my last book reading washington biographies and working my way through them. When you read a lot of them, you realize that what you did in 1900 when you wrote a biography, you read three previous biographies and took your best stab. You get the same information processed over and over again. When they were doing research for the park here in the 1920s, there was no published selection of washingtons papers to speak of. The papers were still disparate. They were being collected. The bicentennial actually led to a collection effort. It was happening at the time, but wasnt published. Today if you want to do work on washington, you can go to any library and have the printed washington papers, annotated, so there are footnotes. The university of virginia has been putting this out for decades. There is still doing it, still records they are coming out with being published. Much of that is now online. You can go to their website and find documents and transcriptions of documents and get a password and have absolute access to the whole thing. And it is searchable. Anybody can do this, anybody can spend hours with washingtons papers. It was not like that when they were writing biography is the 1900, very few people had access to this information. We dont have to feel too indebted to the analyses that took place in those periods. Those periods are fascinating for what those analyses say about the period. They are part of this story and there are pieces worth paying attention to, but we can do a broader job and understand more. We dont have to worry too much about the kinds of conclusions they came to. We are in a different place. Lets build a little bit of the story so we can get to some of the findings i want to share. Odd place to begin the story, but i always begin it here. You see the earthworks in the foreground of washington . If you look to your right no, your left, same as mine you will see the navy yard burning right there. Where is it . You see all these little earthworks, fortifications with the cannon smoke . Somewhere in there presumably is George Washington parke custis. He got to fire the cannon ceremonially. He was the adopted greatgrandson and revolutionary war veteran. They invited him to participate. I begin with this because, as many of you know, the parke custises are central to the story. He is the one who starts the process of washington commemoration. In 1815 not an accidental time. The british had been up the river, burned the city of washington, the fleet had stopped there and went up through maryland. It was not lost on anybody living on this river that it had been traumatized by this war. What parke custis did with a few revolutionary war veterans was to come to this site to commemorate washington as a rededication of the republic in the wake of the destruction of the city. That memory builds itself into this period of commemoration. As many of you know, he placed a stone. They brought the stone downriver. Over time, the stone got lost, farmers moved it. When they got to the landscape, it was two years when he arrived here, parke custis two years after the last washington Family Member who owns the property, George Corbyn washington had sold the property off. He was sort of distancing himself. There were still family stories about the land, but getting fewer. The washingtons themselves were living more distantly, further away. It is sort of a retreat. There wasnt a lot on the land to recall where the buildings were. Chimneys, we were told there was a cellar hole visible into the 19th century, but also there are a lot of buildings. When you look at the distribution of habitation, there are people all over the place. Not every building needs to be associated with the person you are looking for. It starts a process, this game of commemoration, looking for sites. It leads ultimately to the memorial obelisk at the circle, having been moved. I have just recently learned its base has been trimmed. The flamboyant base in the 1890s was trimmed down a bit. It led to a lot of art. This is one of my favorite topics. When Mason Locke Weems wrote his famous stories of washington in his cherry tree edition of his life of washington, he talked about the home at ferry farm on the rappahannock and described it as a low front of faded red, an aging building overlooking the river. He said people come there still and say, here the Great Washington was born. He immediately said, they were wrong because he was born in Westmoreland County in another site. That is the confusion in 1807 that carries on through the history of these two places. They are always confused one for the other. This was a wonderful example of that confusion, a drawing and etching. It says it is the birthplace of washington, although it is hard to reconcile the landscape as the mirror of the landscape. This would have to be the other side of popes creek if this is supposed to be popes creek on the left. The building itself is a rendering of ferry farm that gets drawn again and again. They have taken the ferry farm home and popped it on the imaginative popes creek rendering. This conflation happens all over the place. People can be forgiven. You have to pay a lot of attention to understand that. This culminates with the Memorial House. I wont go into its story. You can still look at it. A very reasonable facsimile of a colonial home at this period, a little more hulking than we would expect. There are plenty of houses in virginia that look like this, so it fits the bill in that way. This was the argument of one faction who had the ability to render their argument in brick and mortar on the land. Excavations play a crucial role. There werent excavations at the memorial home, but the remains they found are very odd and look like strange outbuildings. They were destroyed to make way for the Memorial House. Other excavations began in the 1930s and that is what we will focus on. You can see the landscape, the cars, the road stretching out. This road dates back to the 1890s, put there so you could drive or ride up to see the obelisk, the one that has been moved. It was originally where the Memorial House was. This road is leading you into the area. Without going into too much detail, they realized there were other features in the area. That cellar seems to be somewhere in this area, so they started to do exploratory digs. It is not the tiniest excavation. I have seen this before, but we dont take photographs in those days. We like to clean up a little before we start to take the photographs. This is a good workshop. You can see our friends standing midway there for scale. Their model is the same model that Colonial Williamsburg is using. James knight, an architect and pioneering archaeologist at Colonial Williamsburg, developed a method of looking up the blocks of the city and digging trenches at 45 degree angles. What that lets you do is bang into brick foundations. The reason being if you go with the block, you may pass the foundation. It is an effective way to find a brick foundation. You will find objects as you encounter them. You wont find earthen features, cellars, post holes, fence lines. You are just trying to bang into bricks. When you find them, you do what we see here, trench around them, trace their outline