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Barbara J. Heath (born 1960) is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville who specializes in historical archaeology of eastern North America and the Caribbean. Her research and teaching focus on the archaeology of the African diaspora, colonialism, historic landscapes, material culture, public archaeology and interpretation, and Thomas Jefferson.
Heath was born in Norwood, Massachusetts in 1960. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Spanish from the College of William and Mary in 1982, and her MA (1983) and Ph.D. (1988) in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research focused on low-fired, hand-built coarse earthenwares made historically by people of African descent in the Caribbean, and is entitled Afro-Caribbean Ware: A Study of Ethnicity on St. Eustatius. Heath has conducted fieldwork in Virginia, Tennessee, and in the Lesser Antilles.
Heath is currently a Professor in, and Department Head of, the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, where she has worked since 2006. Previously, she directed the archaeology program at Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest (1992-2006), and worked as an archaeologist Monticello (1988-1991), the James River Institute for Archaeology(1987-1988), the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (1985-1986), and the College of William and Mary (1983-1986).
Heath has led or participated in a numerous research projects, including current work at Indian Camp and at Coan Hall in Virginia, at Poplar Forest, [1] [2] [3] Monticello, [4] Colonial Williamsburg, and Jordan's Point. In the Caribbean she has worked at Little Bay on Montserrat; as a member of the St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative; and on a variety of colonial sites on St. Eustatius, Netherlands Antilles. [5]
Heath is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in historical archaeology. Her research examines institutionalized slavery and racism in the Middle Atlantic, American South and Caribbean, and colonial frontier interactions in the Middle Atlantic, during the recent past (1600-1900). [6] She examines how people, free and enslaved, created and used material culture—buildings, designed and vernacular landscapes, and handcrafted and mass-produced consumer goods—to promote and strengthen systems of inequality or to survive, challenge and reshape them. [7] Her interests extend to the dynamics of exchange, whether through formalized relationships recorded in store accounts, or barter and trade. [8] Currently, she is researching three areas: the production, exchange and use of pottery made by enslaved and free women of African descent in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Leeward Islands; [5] the enslaved communities of Thomas Jefferson in piedmont Virginia; [9] and the origins of slavery in the seventeenth-century Potomac River valley. [10]
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Monticello was the primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father and the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at age 14. Located just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, in the Piedmont region, the plantation was originally 5,000 acres (20 km2), with Jefferson using the labor of African slaves for extensive cultivation of tobacco and mixed crops, later shifting from tobacco cultivation to wheat in response to changing markets. Due to its architectural and historic significance, the property has been designated a National Historic Landmark. In 1987, Monticello and the nearby University of Virginia, also designed by Jefferson, were together designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The current nickel, a United States coin, features a depiction of Monticello on its reverse side.
Poplar Forest is a plantation and retreat home in Forest, Bedford County, Virginia that belonged to Founding Father and third U.S. president Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson inherited the property in 1773 and began designing and working on his retreat home in 1806. While Jefferson is the most famous individual associated with the property, it had several owners before being purchased for restoration, preservation, and exhibition in 1984.
Martha Skelton Jefferson was the wife of Thomas Jefferson from 1772 until her death. She served as First Lady of Virginia during Jefferson's term as governor from 1779 to 1781. She died in 1782, 19 years before he became president.
Landscape archaeology, a sub-discipline of archaeology and archaeological theory, is the study of the ways in which people in the past constructed and used the environment around them. It is also known as archaeogeography. Landscape archaeology is inherently multidisciplinary in its approach to the study of culture, and is used by pre-historical, classic, and historic archaeologists. The key feature that distinguishes landscape archaeology from other archaeological approaches to sites is that there is an explicit emphasis on the sites' relationships between material culture, human alteration of land/cultural modifications to landscape, and the natural environment. The study of landscape archaeology has evolved to include how landscapes were used to create and reinforce social inequality and to announce one's social status to the community at large. The field includes with the dynamics of geohistorical objects, such as roads, walls, boundaries, trees, and land divisions.
Eston Hemings Jefferson was born into slavery at Monticello, the youngest son of Sally Hemings, a mixed-race enslaved woman. Most historians who have considered the question believe that his father was Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. Evidence from a 1998 DNA test showed that a descendant of Eston matched the Jefferson male line, and historical evidence also supports the conclusion that Thomas Jefferson was probably Eston's father. Many historians believe that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had six children together, four of whom survived to adulthood. Other historians disagree.
John Hemmings was an American woodworker. Born into slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello as a member of the large mixed-race Hemings family, he trained in the Monticello Joinery and became a highly skilled carpenter and woodworker, making furniture and crafting the fine woodwork of the interiors at Monticello and Poplar Forest.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of slave mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property.
Jeffersonian architecture is an American form of Neo-Classicism and/or Neo-Palladianism embodied in the architectural designs of U.S. President and polymath Thomas Jefferson, after whom it is named. These include his home (Monticello), his retreat, the university he founded, and his designs for the homes of friends and political allies. More than a dozen private homes bearing his personal stamp still stand today. Jefferson's style was popular in the early American period at about the same time that the more mainstream Greek Revival architecture was also coming into vogue (1790s–1830s) with his assistance.
Francis Wayles Eppes was a planter and slave owner from Virginia who became a cotton planter in the Florida Territory and later civic leader in Tallahassee and surrounding Leon County, Florida. After reaching legal age and marrying, Eppes operated the Poplar Forest plantation which his grandfather President Thomas Jefferson had established in Bedford County, Virginia, which he inherited. However, in 1829 he moved with his family to near Tallahassee, Florida. Long interested in education, in 1856 Eppes donated land and money to designate a school in Tallahassee as one of the first two state-supported seminaries, now known as Florida State University. He served as president of its board of trustees for eight years.
Madison Hemings was the son of the mixed-race enslaved woman Sally Hemings and, according to most Jefferson scholars, her enslaver, President Thomas Jefferson. He was the third of her four children to survive to adulthood. Born into slavery, according to partus sequitur ventrem, Hemings grew up on Jefferson's Monticello plantation, where his mother was also enslaved. After some light duties as a young boy, Hemings became a carpenter and fine woodwork apprentice at around age 14 and worked in the joiner's shop until he was about 21. He learned to play the violin and was able to earn money by growing cabbages. Jefferson died in 1826, after which Sally Hemings was "given her time" by Jefferson's surviving daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph.
Thomas Jefferson Randolph of Albemarle County was a Virginia planter, soldier and politician who served multiple terms in the Virginia House of Delegates, as rector of the University of Virginia, and as a colonel in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. The favorite grandson of President Thomas Jefferson, he helped manage Monticello near the end of his grandfather's life and was executor of his estate, and later also served in the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850 and at the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861.
Elizabeth Hemings was an enslaved mixed-race woman in colonial Virginia. With her enslaver, planter John Wayles, she had six children, including Sally Hemings. These children were three-quarters white, and, following the condition of their mother, they were enslaved from birth; they were half-siblings to Wayles's daughter, Martha Jefferson. After Wayles died, the Hemings family and some 120 other enslaved people were inherited, along with 11,000 acres and £4,000 debt, as part of his estate by his daughter Martha and her husband Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 slaves during his adult life. Jefferson freed two slaves while he lived, and five others were freed after his death, including two of his children from his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. After his death, the rest of the slaves were sold to pay off his estate's debts.
John Wayles was a colonial American planter, slave trader and lawyer in colonial Virginia. He is historically best known as the father-in-law of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. Wayles married three times, with these marriages producing eleven children; only five of them lived to adulthood. Through his female slave Betty Hemings, Wayles fathered six additional children, including Sally Hemings, who was the mother of six children by Thomas Jefferson and half-sister of Martha Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, was involved in politics from his early adult years. This article covers his early life and career, through his writing the Declaration of Independence, participation in the American Revolutionary War, serving as governor of Virginia, and election and service as Vice-President to President John Adams.
The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) is an ongoing Internet-based research and archival initiative of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation meant to advance the historical understanding of slavery and slave-based society in the United States and the Caribbean in the time before the American Civil War. The project was initially founded in 2000 with funds from the Archaeology Department of Monticello, the historical home and plantation of Thomas Jefferson and a modern UNESCO World Heritage Site. The project's goals include cultivating collaboration between scholars of multiple disciplines and the sharing and open access to American slavery-related archaeological data.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, originally known as the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, is a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation founded in 1923 to purchase and maintain Monticello, the primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. The Foundation's initial focus was on architectural preservation, with the goal of restoring Monticello as close to its original appearance as possible. It has since grown to include other historic and cultural pursuits and programs such as its Annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony. It also publishes and provides a center for scholarship on Jefferson and his era.
Theresa A. Singleton is an American archaeologist and writer who focuses on the archaeology of African Americans, the African diaspora, and slavery in the United States. She is a leading archaeologist applying comparative approaches to the study of slavery in the Americas. Singleton has been involved in the excavation of slave residences in the southern United States and in the Caribbean. She is a professor of anthropology at Syracuse University, and serves as a curator for the National Museum of Natural History.
Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge was the granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and daughter of Martha Jefferson Randolph and Thomas Mann Randolph. Coolidge had a close relationship with Jefferson, serving as an assistant until her marriage.
Martin Hemings was a man enslaved to Thomas Jefferson. He worked as Jefferson's butler at Monticello.
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