Birth in 2032 imposes a sense of urgency to determine exactly where he was born. The George Washington birthplace National Monument hosted this program. It is one hour and a half. Everyone andnoon welcome to George Washington birthplace National Monument. I am the chief of interpretations here at this park. Today, i am to introduce the guests speaker to the audience. Dr. Philip leavy is a professor of history at the university of south florida where he holds appointments in the department of anthropology and the college of global sustainability. He received his phd from the college of william and mary. In two thousand eight, he gained International Attention as part of the team that found the remains of George Washington childhood home in fredericksburg, virginia. He recounted this in his 2013 the the story of where cherry tree group. I havek from 2015, which right here in my hand, is George Washington written up on the land. We have copies in the bookstore. This book explores the many weak points of washingtons much fabled childhood and covers themes ranging from biography to archaeology and he is currently writing the archaeology of George Washington, a survey of all of the Great Washingtons sites and their stories. Dr. Leavy has also conducted a reassessment of the 1930s archaeological record here at George Washington earth place. He says this is one of the most intriguing and misunderstood washington archaeological site. Is time toarm it make sense of the archaeological birthplace. Speaking onll be the findings of his 2013 reassessment of the sites archaeology and will highlight the things that generates and generations have gotten right and those it has gotten wrong. For those of us committed to the landscape, will want to speak loudly and clearly of the momentous events that took place here nearly 300 years ago. The world will be watching. Ladies and gentlemen, without further reduce, please welcome, dr. Philip leavy. [applause] thank you everyone. Thanks for coming out here. Thanks for being here. And things for the introduction. And thanks for the introduction. I have two microphones. I can talk really loudly. Maybe i will just ignore the microphone and talk at a louder volume. To docrophones will have their balance game. The introduction gave a little theof a tip of some of things im going to talk about and give away one of my punchlines but that is ok. Like to put these things up for the past decade or more, i have been interested in washingtons childhood, especially the landscapes of his childhood. My field of study has become washington memory. Ae way washington is used as figure in other discussions. In some ways, it is inspired by our by archaeology. You have a responsibility for every other period along the way which you also excavate. I approached this landscape study in a similar way. It is about washington, but also about washington in the 1930s, 1860s, 1830s. There are other people working on this but this has become very important to me and it extends from an archaeological beginning. I like to look at the sites and work from the sites and i use them as my framework. The number 2032 up. Why . What is special about that . This is probably the worst audience to ask that question of because you know. This is coming next. Does this clarify . An essential thing we have to keep in mind. , 2032 is 10terms minutes away. It takes a very long time to organize the scale of an event that has to happen. Anniversary ofl his birth, was an event that was planned for 20 years before it came into being. At the point where we are in relation to the tricentenary, it has already bindu it has already been decided that there will be a massive celebration. We will want to start to eat the drums on this and all of you can help by being loyal to the landscape and getting the idea out that there has to be something. Someone will figure out that 2032 is coming upon us. It is just a question of when that will happen. We want to get something solid and powerful and focused on the landscape that brings peoples attention to the community. We could do it well or poorly. Thisve to recognize that is happening and we want to turn the 300th anniversary of his birth into Something Interesting and substantive. The 200thennial, anniversary, was crucial in the formation of this landscape. Not in the geological sense. The Preservation Movement born the 1920s here became became a crucial piece of the making of the park and in 1932, the federal projects, the federal government had involvement and it produced an enormous man of literature and awareness of washington. It is central to the story here. The park has one major outcome from it. I like to use a map. This map at a talk overseas and that was pointless. The potomac river. It does not always work. What we know where we are, halfway up the potomac. We are in the core of old settlement. What is emerging now is the difference between virginia regions. Instead of thinking of a single virginia colony, we are Getting Better at thinking about subregions. We are starting to think about the potomac as a subregion unto itself. This is the landscape we are focusing on. It came into the folk into focus in the 1920s and the 1930s. These should be familiar to you. Do we have a pointer . This will work. This point of land here the Memorial House, the curved the reconstructed outbuildings there. And we cannot see the visitor center, but close to where we are. There is a third point of land in the potomac beyond. This is where we are going to focus. Talking about how this place has been understood and misunderstood. As a background to this, as we approach 2032, a lot of discussions began and one of them, not five years ago, was about the need to understand the archaeological effort here. We were able to find the money to do a reassessment of the 1930s archaeological record. That is the first step. We need to understand what that record looks like. Is a considerably long time ago and much of the world has changed. We dont operate archaeologically the same way as we did 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. You can find people define people, defined sites, defined 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 archaeologically 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 and ground buildings existed. They know there can be farmed buildings, but they did not know anything about post and 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 said, data set, to be able to bring much to bear on that. They can identify buildings, but dont have the document done 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 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 300 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 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 lifetime for my last book reading washington biographies and working my way through them. When you realize 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 dad. 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 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. Ucb 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 canon 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 park us this and 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 why this work. 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 bills 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, and 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 upsilon 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 it story. You can still look at it. A very reasonable facsimile of a colonial home at this. A little more whole thing than 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 their 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 earth and features, sellers, 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, then you have your building. That is the technique they are bringing to bear. In 1930, they locate what gets called buil