Williamsburg's new center lets visitors see archaeology up close

As anyone who's ever done so knows, moving is a giant pain.

Now imagine moving millions of items, each of them delicate, unique, priceless and old. Like, two to three centuries old.

That process is underway now at Colonial Williamsburg, the Virginia living history town that is marking its own 100th birthday as America celebrates its 250th birthday.

"We've been packing for the past two years so we’re excited to start the [moving] process," said Jack Gary, Colonial Williamsburg's director of archaeology. "The goal is to move the entire collection with nothing lost and nothing broken – even things that are already broken."

"The entire collection" means millions of items excavated over the past century, from pieces of plates and intact bottles and bricks, household items and even bits of food from centuries ago.

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Their final destination: the brand-new Colin G. and Nancy N. Campbell Archaeology Center, which opened to the public April 25. The 40,000-square foot facility will not only display items found in Williamsburg – it will offer visitors an up-close look at the science and art of archaeology in real time.

Still a lot more to learn

Gary said archaeology has been ongoing at Colonial Williamsburg since 1928. The town was established in 1699 as the capital of the Virginia colony, located near other early English settlements and William & Mary, the college established in 1693. Williamsburg would play a prominent role in the American Revolution as the seat of Virginia's government until 1780 (when the capital was changed to Richmond). Williamsburg proper fell into decline in the 19th century, according to Battlefields.org and was occupied by the Union Army for much of the Civil War. During the 1920s, efforts to restore the town and to recognize its historic significance began.

Today, the nonprofit Colonial Williamsburg Foundation works to preserve, restore and operate the village and its restored or reconstructed buildings, educational outreach programs and living history shops, taverns, restaurants and hotels.

"At the beginning of [Williamsburg's] restoration, they realized archaeology was central to that," Gary said. Early excavations were geared toward finding original buildings and materials to recreate the colonial-era village. "They didn't keep all the artifacts; they'd put some of them back in the ground where they found them."

In 1957, Ivor Noël Hume became Colonial Williamsburg's first full-time professional archaeologist, and he took a more modern approach, establishing a permanent lab and working to understand the lives of the ordinary people who lived and worked in Williamsburg. Starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present, there's also been an effort to understand more about marginalized groups, including Williamsburg's poor, its working class and people who were enslaved in the area.

More recently, Gary said, archaeology in Williamsburg has "evolved to look at things like landscapes and gardens, and understand more about things that seem ephemeral, like pollen and botanical analysis."

With only about 30% of Williamsburg excavated, there's still much more to learn.

"We're constantly going back to sites that have already been excavated or finding new sites," Gary said. "Think of all the other places we still have to look at, and we've found so much in just our first 100 years."

Their trash is archaeologists' treasure

Williamsburg, where government officials mixed with merchants and artisans and where enslaved people and indentured servants propped up the local economy with their labor, provides a trove of information about life in the 18th and 19th centuries, Gary said.

Historians estimate that about 52% of Revolutionary-era Williamsburg was Black. Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists are working to learn more about the African Baptist Meeting House, one of the oldest Black churches in the country. The original church is no longer standing, but archaeologists have teamed with members of the current congregation to ensure their history is properly preserved.

"It's not always easy in an urban setting to tease out, these are the things used by enslaved people and these things were used by free white people," Gary said. "Everyone's trash gets mingled together."

Trash, in archaeological terms, can be a great equalizer. Archaeology, Gary said, is the "study of trash."

"It's the things everyone was throwing away, as opposed to documents where you can easily leave people or stories out," he continued. "So we rely on that, because we know, everyone has to eat and everyone throws things out."

Even, uh, other waste can offer insight into the past, he added.

"Chamber pots and privies have amazing information and, well, that's something everyone does," Gary said. "It's universal."

'We're showing our work'

The move to the new archaeology center is ongoing. But the public can get a glimpse of how archaeologists work and even how they've undertaken the task of moving millions of items. The goal is to have everything moved by the end of July.

"We're showing our work, as they say," Gary told USA TODAY. "This is an opportunity to show the public, this is how we know what we know."

Colonial Williamsburg's team of 22 archaeologists believes that openness will help people form a more tangible connection to history.

"People can see and interact with us while we're excavating," Gary said, "but they can see the other side of the process, too, the lab work, what we do with artifacts, even as they're being washed.

"When people have an emotional connection, we can create stewards of the work we're doing and they'll support us, and that's a big part of what we do."

Phaedra Trethan is a national correspondent for USA TODAY, writing about history and Americana. Contact her by email at [email protected], on X @wordsbyphaedra, on BlueSky @byphaedra, or on Threads @by_phaedra.