Editor's Note: Originally published in the July/August 2005 issue

I’m following Belgian archaeologist Julie Van Den Bergh around Laos’ remote Xieng Khouang Province. We’re inspecting giant ancient vessels, which are scattered through rice paddies, forests, and hilltops at more than 60 sites across what is known as the Plain of Jars. Archaeologists think the jars were mortuary containers, perhaps 2,000 years old. But no one knows for sure their precise age, who built them, or why. They are swathed in mystery and surrounded by unexploded bombs.

Xieng Khouang Province is one of the most heavily bombed places on earth. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dumped four billion pounds of bombs on the country in a “secret war” against Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese communists. Up to a third of them never exploded, and they litter the land today. While generally safe to tread upon, buried UXO (unexploded ordnance) can detonate when an erratic fuse is inadvertently triggered. The earth around here is dangerous to farmers plowing fields, children staking buffalo out to graze—and to archaeologists.

The jars are huge, up to nine feet tall, the largest weighing 14 tons. Most are carved of sandstone, others of granite, conglomerate, or calcified coral. Some are round, others angular, and a few have disks that appear to be lids. Tools and human remains found inside and around the jars suggest their use and manufacture spanned centuries. The bulk of material dates from 500 B.C. to A.D. 800, and additional carbon dates are expected this summer.

Archaeologists are certain the Plain of Jars is one of Southeast Asia’s most important archaeological sites—but it is one with more questions than answers.

French archaeologist Madeleine Colani pioneered research in Xieng Khouang in the 1930s. She found jars with cremated human remains and a nearby cave with burned bones and ash. Colani speculated the cave was a crematorium, the jars were mortuary vessels, and the fields were ancient cemeteries. Today, more than 2,000 jars have been identified across the province.

These archaeological treasures sit in one of the world’s poorest regions. That’s why Van Den Bergh, a UNESCO consultant from the Hong Kong–based Archaeological Assessments, is here. She hopes to turn the Plain of Jars into a UNESCO World Heritage site. The UNESCO-Lao Project to Safeguard the Plain of Jars aims not only to protect the vessels but to rehabilitate this remote province by clearing bombs, restoring agricultural lands, and promoting tourism.

A specialist in geoarchaeology with a decade of experience in Asia, Van Den Bergh has worked in Laos on six-week stints for four years now. In conjunction with the Lao government and a geographer from Bangkok, the project includes training Laotians to recover, record, and store archaeological material; create a precise map of the jar fields; and identify key areas for preservation and tourism development. The project also enlists local villagers to help with these tasks and involves the British-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a non-governmental organization hired to remove explosives from the most popular jar sites.

Some dub the Plain of Jars “the world’s most dangerous archaeological site,” and Van Den Bergh readily agrees. While archaeologists occasionally encounter UXO in war-torn countries and military testing grounds around the world, perhaps no archaeological site is as contaminated as the Plain of Jars. Two archaeologists conducted limited excavations in the 1990s without incident, “but that’s just luck,” Van Den Bergh says. “I’ve come home from surveying and thought, I’m happy to be getting into the car and coming home.”

• Video:Plain of Jars Mystery
• Feature:A Singular Landscape

My husband, Jerry, and I first visited Xieng Khouang in 1998. Back then, the capital, Phonsavan, was a Wild West sort of town with a main street of mud, on-again off-again water, and equally unreliable electricity. You could count on three fingers the tourists arriving each day. We stayed at a dimly lit guesthouse with a lobby full of bomb casings, mortar shells, grenades, and guns. Back then, we knew UXO still polluted the ground. But we didn’t know the jar sites remained riddled with bombs or that UXO continued to kill villagers every week in Xieng Khouang. And we didn’t know our guesthouse displayed four live bombs. (No worries now, MAG removed them.) When we arrive in Phonsavan this time, it’s still a dusty cow town, but the nights are ablaze with fluorescence, cheap restaurants and guest houses line the streets, and tourists from all over the world fill them.

Van Den Bergh drives us half an hour outside town, over a bone-rattling road, to a wooden house where MAG bases its operations. There, we meet Stuart Broome, the jovial ex-military man from Australia who heads the clearance team. The staff, about two dozen strong, are celebrating. Beer is flowing, music is thumping. A week ahead of schedule, they’ve just finished clearing Jar Sites 1, 2, and 3, the most popular tourist stops, each within a 45-minute drive of Phonsavan. Visitors now can safely explore those sites, provided they stick within MAG’s red-and-white concrete markers.

“Tourists come unaware of how dangerous Xieng Khouang is,” Van Den Bergh says. The jars have attracted travelers as long as Laos has, but many recent visitors never knew they were crossing contaminated land. Some local guides mistakenly told their guests all was safe and clear long before it was. Here, the ordnance problem isn’t visible, as it is in neighboring Cambodia, where land mines have left thousands of amputees. If UXO blows, “it’ll just kill you,” Broome says. No limbs lost, no person left. Nothing to illustrate the danger.

There is no reliable tally of UXO victims, but experts hear of at least one a week. They admit that’s probably low. Broome tells us of 11 accidents the week before we meet, “that we know of.” There were four two weeks before that, “that we know of.” But later we learn of eight more, for a total of 12. “That we know of” is an oft-used qualifier here.

MAG’s clearance records are staggering: Since work started in July 2004, the team has successfully removed and destroyed 127 pieces of UXO, cleared six acres, visually searched 55 acres, and found 31,814 pieces of scrap metal. And that’s just Site 1.

Finding explosives—using a variety of metal detectors covering 15-inch to seven-foot swathes—is a scrupulous task. Workers move back and forth, up and down a grid of red-rope lanes, detectors in hand. Each signal is marked with a red chip, and each chip is investigated by a technician with a shovel. They always dig down and toward the source, starting half a foot back. “We don’t dig on top,” Broome explains, “because that could cause UXO to blow.” UXO that is safe to move is stored until each Friday, when MAG detonates the entire week’s cache.

“It’s really similar, archaeology and bomb disposal,” Van Den Bergh wryly explains. When MAG clears a site, all the scrap metal is plopped in a bucket. Broome is first to peek at the findings, and Van Den Bergh’s quick to follow. Both are curious about the bucket, because its contents can tell a story about the site, either through bomb fragments or metal artifacts.

Broome and I examine the bucket one morning: a projectile fragment, cartridge cases, barbed wire, cans. I pick up a piece. “It’s a cartridge case from a recoilless rifle,” he says. He ogles an aluminum bit. “I think it’s part of a rocket motor.” It was all found in the parking lot at Site 3.

• Video:Plain of Jars Mystery
• Feature:A Singular Landscape

One bright Saturday, Van Den Bergh leads us through Site 1, pointing to hundreds of jars, scattered over parched grasslands and rolling hills just outside of town. A few cows graze through the area. Western tourists trundle downhill, ignoring the MAG markers; Laotian kids scramble uphill, doing the same. It will take time for people to learn.

We walk from jar to jar, each in small clusters. Van Den Bergh only has permission to survey on site. “All our excavations are connected to the MAG excavations,” she explains. “We don’t have permission to excavate for research.” She suspects the ground below our feet is rife with archaeological information—perhaps tools, burial urns, bones, or charcoal that could more precisely pin a date or offer conclusions on the historical background of the site. But Van Den Bergh is here solely to help prepare the sites for nomination for World Heritage status—taking inventory, mapping the jars, and creating a database. Working with MAG provided a bonus, the chance to see below the surface. “While they dig, we collect the information,” she says.

In fact, the jars have not been studied much. “Archaeologically, Laos is almost terra incognita,” writes Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, the country’s only certified archaeologist and one of few to have excavated the jars. He, like Van Den Bergh, relies heavily on Colani, who documented her findings in two massive volumes titled The Megaliths of Upper Laos. Seventy years later, they remain the primary source on the jars.

The Plain of Jars seems to coincide with the Khorat Plateau in Thailand and the North Cachar Hills of India, where jar burials have also been found. These were transformative times, some 2,000 years ago, of agricultural advancement, metal manufacturing, religious expansion, widening Asian trade routes, and the societal precursors to urbanization. Colani speculated the Plain of Jars lay at an important intersection of trade routes that stretched, perhaps, from India to Vietnam.

She found beads and bronze and iron tools. The cave she discovered on Site 1 has blackened walls and two chimney openings that signaled to her that bodies had been cremated here before placement inside the jars.

Japanese archaeologist Eiji Nitta excavated some of the jars in 1994, and Thongsa followed a couple of years later. Both found burial pits containing human bones among the jars, and both concluded the sites were used for secondary burials. Van Den Bergh wonders about the archaeological discoveries over time: Colani found burned bones; Thongsa and Nitta found unburned. Did they stem from different periods? Were they halfhearted cremations? It seems the deceased was either buried or put in a stone jar for defleshing. Then the bones were either cremated or placed directly into an urn and buried. But questions nag her. Nitta found an urn with human bones and teeth beneath a jar at Site 1. It looked to him like tenth-century pottery from the Khmer Empire, and he concluded the stone jar directly above this urn could be no older than that. If so, that would make the jar 1,000 years younger than previously thought. Van Den Bergh doesn’t dispute this date but thinks the jar sites were occupied and used over many centuries.

Nitta, who returned to Japan, has sent his reports to Van Den Bergh—but she has not been able to reach him since. She has spoken with Thongsa several times, but he now studies in Australia and their work at the jars has yet to coincide. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) Furthermore, many of Colani’s artifacts have disappeared from Laos over the years. So Van Den Bergh plugs along with what she has.

She questions villagers, hoping they’ll know something about the jars. But they always return to the same legend of an ancient king named Khun Cheung, an epic battle against an evil enemy, and a grand victory celebrated with copious quantities of alcohol some 1,500 years ago. The jars, they say, stored tons of lao lao, a hammering rice whiskey still enjoyed today.

• Video:Plain of Jars Mystery
• Feature:A Singular Landscape

Van Den Bergh doesn’t discount this theory. Like any good Belgian, she likes her beer. When people die in Belgium, “it always involves lots of drinking,” she says. “So I can understand lots and lots of lao lao on a grave site.” (Though she doubts the jars were fermenters.)

As we continue touring Site 1, she points toward a zigzag of war-era trenches, to the bottoms of bomb craters where villagers dig for scrap metal, to a cavity in the hillside once used as a tank position.

She points to broken jars, a cause of consternation. They’ve been bombed and looted. Cows rub them, tourists climb them, trees straddle them. Villagers fashion the jars into water troughs or knife sharpeners. “Between the war, cattle, people, and trees, we are losing a lot,” she says. The weaker the jars get, the quicker they topple.

So she has a few plans. A bamboo fence will enclose some of the jars to deter cows, but she doesn’t want an overly restrictive situation. After all, part of the charm is that people can walk freely among the jars. But the cows must go, and so must some of the trees. “People come up here and picnic,” she says. “It’s just not acceptable.... We don’t want people to stay on site. We just want them to visit.”

In fact, Van Den Bergh wants more visitors. About 9,000 traveled to Site 1 last year from all over the world, but only a third of those reached Site 2, and fewer yet Site 3, which lies farther outside town. Van Den Bergh hopes tourism can spur the local agrarian economy, which affords most people less than a dollar each day. Site 1 is run by the government, but at other sites surrounding villages get half of the 7,000-kip (70-cent) entrance fees. Van Den Bergh hopes new jar sites will open soon, though “they’re not safe, of course.” They haven’t been cleared of UXO. Funding for MAG’s role in the project ended with clearance for Sites 1, 2 and 3.

Van Den Bergh’s is a shoestring operation, evident as soon as we enter her office. It sits on the second floor of a wooden building, a rustic work room with a back half stocked with shelves and metal trunks. Her face brightens as she reveals her treasures, collected from various sites, packed in plastic bags and acid-free paper: pottery sherds, a stone adze, a bugle (presumably French or Chinese, left in a war-era trench), a small Buddha, six metal knives, and tools made of flaky white stone.

Then she beckons to the back, smiling: “Our pride and joy!” There, wrapped gingerly in Ace bandages and foam, packed in wooden crates, are two urns found in a Site 1 trench dug during UXO clearance. They’re about two feet tall, brown, and coated in resin, and they look like bombs—which is what Van Den Bergh was told when she took one to the hospital for x-rays. They also resemble the urn Nitta found with bones. Van Den Bergh’s pots are stuffed with soil, too fragile to empty, but the x-rays revealed a possible bone fragment inside. Someday, she’ll figure a way to get at the contents.

But she doesn’t have the money right now. UNESCO is paying $275,000 for the project, but that includes overhead and fund-raising costs. Only about half that amount reaches Van Den Bergh in the field.

• Video:Plain of Jars Mystery
• Feature:A Singular Landscape

A few years back, project members started going village to village asking, Do you have jars? If so, they could attract tourists and money. Van Den Bergh still crisscrosses the province, greeting villagers and sitting for hours on wooden floors in homes on stilts. She is accompanied by government officials, and the meetings require exhaustive explanations: what the jars mean to archaeology, why tourists are interested, how tourism might help villagers. The jars are valuable relics, she explains, and UNESCO hopes to protect them as World Heritage—a status afforded to few.

Villagers usually don’t think much of the jars—they’re just rocks in the backyard. But once they get the idea that the jars are really important, they start talking about “new” jars. They had always been there, but no one realized they mattered.

We attend one of these meetings, in Na Xaytong village, an hour’s drive from Phonsavan. Chan Mootee, an elder, says the villagers here attribute healing qualities to the jars, and they pour jar water over the heads of ill children. Many years ago, he says, village monks rolled a jar to the temple for use as a water basin. But many people quickly grew sick, so the monks returned the jar to its original site.

When all the stories have been told, we gather for a feast of cabbage soup, boiled chicken, green-papaya salad, and a tray of fried innards in congealed duck blood—which we forgo. But what comes next, no one can avoid: the lao lao. Round and round the room it goes, several sherry glasses of firewater offered in an ancient tradition of hospitality and celebration.

That meeting is a prelude to a long hike to a survey site near a Hmong village called Ban Phakeo—a place with many jars but little in the way of tourism development. It’s a half-hour trudge downhill until the trail crosses a rickety bamboo bridge and makes a sharp upward turn. We see miles of blue-green mountains in hot haze. “I’m not tired,” Van Den Bergh pants, after another 90 minutes hiking through the sweltering jungle. “I’m just dead.”

Ban Phakeo is a collection of wooden homes, most with earthen floors, thatch roofs, and cluster-bomb casings for planters and feed troughs. The one-room schoolhouse has a bell made from bomb scrap, and the walls are decked with posters showing kids proper behavior around UXO: Don’t stake your buffalo to the ground; tie it to a tree instead. Never touch UXO. Tell an adult if you see something suspicious.

Farther uphill, another half an hour away, there are nearly 400 jars toppled in the forest, covered in mosaics of green and white lichens. The team quickly gets to business, stretching a tape measure from jar to jar, numbering, measuring, and photographing details. We spend two days among these ancient vessels, and the team works diligently amid scrub brush and trees, avoiding thoughts of UXO. Nothing here has been cleared.

It’s amazing, these jars sitting in the woods, on a windy hill. I catch Van Den Bergh in a moment of reflection, and she offers a pensive sigh. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” It is, really, the only imaginable comment. The beauty of these magnificent jars is indisputable; their value to archaeology is certain. These things are known. But for now, little else about the jars is.

Karen Coates is author of Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War. See more of her work at www.redcoates.net.

• Video:Plain of Jars Mystery
• Feature:A Singular Landscape

Originally published in the November/December 2006 issue

In Talbot County, Eastern Shore, State of Maryland, near Easton, the county town, there is a small district of country, thinly populated, and remarkable for nothing that I know of more than for the worn-out, sandy, desert-like appearance of its soil, the general dilapidation of its farms and fences, the indigent and spiritless character of its inhabitants, and the prevalence of ague and fever. It was in this dull, flat, and unthrifty district or neighborhood, bordered by the Choptank river, among the laziest and muddiest of streams surrounded by a white population of the lowest order, indolent and drunken to a proverb, and among slaves who, in point of ignorance and indolence, were fully in accord with their surroundings, that I, without any fault of my own, was born, and spent the first years of my childhood. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881)

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Under the boughs of a huge tulip poplar, buried among clumps of roots and piles of oyster shells, is the brick foundation of a building, a remnant of a once-thriving slave community. For 18 months in the early nineteenth century, it was home to a young Frederick Douglass, the future African-American statesman, diplomat, orator, and author. Here, at the age of seven or eight, a shoeless, pantless, precocious Douglass first saw whippings and petty cruelties. Here, he first realized he was a slave. “A lot of the horror that comes through his autobiographies is grounded in those months that he was there,” says James Oakes, a historian at the City University of New York who is working on a book about Douglass’s relationship with Abraham Lincoln. The modest excavation at Wye House Farm, a 350-year-old estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, has yielded sherds, buttons, pipe stems, beads, and precious knowledge about everyday slave life, and is allowing the descendants of that slave community, many of whom live in the nearby rural African-American town of Unionville, to reclaim a lost cultural hertiage.

A team of archaeologists and students started digging here in 2005 after archaeologist Lisa Kraus proposed the dig, on the basis of Douglass’s descriptions of the site, to Mark Leone, director of the urban archaeology field school at the University of Maryland. Before beginning the excavation, Leone approached St. Stephen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, the social and religious center of Unionville, to ask what the people of the community wanted to learn from the archaeology. “You should ask the people who think it’s their heritage what they want to know about it,” Leone says. “The answers automatically dissolve the difference between then and now.” This, he adds, is the heart of social archaeology, working with descendant communities and understanding that the past and present inform one another. The people of Unionville wanted to know about slave spirituality, what remained of African life, how the owner of the slaves did or did not support freedom, and how slaves found the strength to survive. They are questions a single dig is unlikely to answer, but they have opened an avenue of dialogue between the archaeologists and the people to whom their work matters most.

A sharp, fetid smell wafts off the nearby cove, where swarms of insects form a halo over still water. Leone, a tall, fair anthropologist who has spent his career studying class and race in the historical landscape of Annapolis, speaks slowly and deliberately. “What we have discovered is there’s archaeology everywhere,” he says, as a team of students profile and photograph the site under the tulip poplar behind him. “We’ve only scratched the surface.” Waving his hand across the rolling landscape bordered by the cove on one side and a farm road on the other, he explains that it was once all part of a slave community buzzing with activity.

Leone and Kraus, a graduate student at the University of Texas, have for the last two field seasons led this dig, which is on the grounds of a grand plantation that has been, and still is, privately owned by one family—the Lloyds, one of the founding families of Maryland. The team so far has uncovered three structures packed with domestic and commercial artifacts of slave life, and they expect to find more next season.

Mary Tilghman, the Lloyd family matriarch and eleventh-generation descendant of Edward Lloyd, who settled the property in the 1660s, receives guests in the well-appointed, hunting-themed south parlor of the estate’s late Georgian mansion, just a hundred yards or so from the dig site. Tilghman, a proper yet lively woman of 87, dressed in a long khaki skirt and collared blouse, has piercing blue eyes and pale skin like creased parchment. She taps her aluminum cane on the hardwood floor as she speaks. “I think it’s fascinating and I think seeing something, rather than assuming something was there, that’s intriguing, This is probably a very foreign culture to a great many people.”

Tilghman, who rides around the estate on a golf cart with bundles of dried flowers tied to the back, doesn’t live in this mansion, but in a smaller building known as the Captain’s house, named for Captain Aaron Anthony, the farm manager who actually owned the young Douglass and is believed to have been his biological father. Tilghman clearly doesn’t condone the slavery practiced by her ancestors and their employees, but she doesn’t feel the need to apologize for it either. Yet even though she is a private woman, she has opened her property to archaeologists, reporters, and descendants of the slaves her family once owned. “She could have refused quite gracefully and no one would have thought any the worse of her,” says Kraus. “[The Lloyds] have contributed hugely to the founding of the country and the ideas that it’s based on, but at the same time there’s this—it’s not even a skeleton in the closet, it’s on the lawn, right there.”

This site is distinguished from other slave community excavations by an embarrassment of primary sources. In addition to Douglass’s detailed descriptions of slave life, in the 1960s architectural historian Henry Chandlee Forman drew maps of the estate himself or traced them from disintegrating maps in the family archives. There are also aerial photographs from the 1930s and 400 boxes of Lloyd family archives, which include both business documents and personal letters and diaries, stored at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. Most importantly, there is a very rare commodity, the people of Wye House Farm and Unionville and their family lore and memories of childhood. “You play these primary sources off of each other,” says Leone, comparing, for example, the aerial photographs with Forman’s maps and Tilghman’s childhood recollections. At the farm’s height in the mid-1800s, the Lloyds may have owned more than a thousand slaves spread across dozens of corn, tobacco, and livestock farms in the area and beyond. In a single transaction in 1830, according to the archives, they spent $24,000 on 72 slaves.

During the Civil War, some local slaves enlisted in the Union Army, and their owners were compensated $300 each. Upon returning from the war, many of these newly freed men returned to the places that they knew. When 18 soldiers from this area—many of whom are thought to have come from Wye House Farm—returned, an abolitionist Quaker named Cowgill offered them a reasonable lease on land and the town of Unionville was founded. Just down the road from the farm, Unionville today is a poor but tidy rural town of single-family homes. The tightly knit and proud community is centered around St. Stephen’s and its adjoining graveyard, where the 18 soldiers are interred. Some of the names on the gravestones—Roberts, Demby, Bailey (Douglass’s birthname)—appear on the Lloyd’s slave rolls. Douglass even mentioned one, “Uncle” Isaac Copper, by name. Today, as in Douglass’s day, old money and rural poverty, divided along racial lines, sit side-by-side.

Then here were a great many houses, human habitations full of the mysteries of life at every stage of it. There was the little red house up the road, occupied by Mr. Seveir, the overseer; a little nearer to my old master’s stood a long, low, rough building literally alive with slaves of all ages, sexes, conditions, sizes, and colors. This was called the long quarter. Perched upon a hill east of our house, was a tall dilapidated old brick building, the architectural dimensions of which proclaimed its creation for a different purpose, now occupied by slaves, in a similar manner to the long quarters. Besides these, there were numerous other slave houses and huts, scattered around in the neighborhood, every nook and corner of which, were completely occupied. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS

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The bustling slave community was located on the estate’s “long green,” an area nearly a mile long and 300 feet across at its widest point, and which runs along a farm road between the mansion and the cove. In Douglass’s time, it accounted for much of the business of the farm, such as carpentry and metalwork conducted by skilled slaves who lived here. The red overseer’s house that Douglass described still stands, even though swaths of the long green have since been tilled and incorporated into fields of soy and corn.

The excavation team, which included three African-American students in the 2006 season, sought to understand how the buildings there were used and the specifics of slave life, such as trade and skilled labor. The crew used shovel tests and maps to identify the likely spot, in an untouched portion of the long green, of a two-story slave quarters described by both Douglass and Forman, only to find that it was already occupied by the tulip poplar—six feet in diameter and fifty feet tall. With insects whapping against their faces and clothes and surprisingly large lizards scuttling underfoot, the team spent the summer cutting through and digging around a dense network of roots to uncover a brick foundation full of domestic artifacts, including sherds of heavy ceramics and porcelains, a spoon, a thimble, beads, a knife blade, and hundreds of bones from domestic animals, including pigs, cows, and chickens, and wild animals, including rabbits, deer, turtles, and fish. The area had never been plowed, so despite the roots the site was largely intact.

“We have a history of African-American life that has this amazing time depth,” says Kraus. “Archaeology really gives us information about their day-to-day practices.” For example, pottery finds suggest that the slaves of Wye House Farm did not have access to a market or make ceramics themselves—most of what they used was passed down from the Lloyds. Other items, such as beads, buttons, and decorations, were probably not passed down and may have come, by night and by canoe, from a secret, prohibited trade network with other slave communities. Even though the slaves were worked almost constantly, and getting caught would have resulted in a beating from an overseer, they took great risks to build lives beyond the fields. “I don’t think that’s really been documented before,” says Kraus. With further analysis of the artifacts and where they were found, she hopes to discover how slave life may have changed over the decades that the site was occupied.

With the maps and further poking around, the team also found a large foundation overgrown with vines and poison ivy next to the water line. Tilghman remembered this structure from her childhood as a corn crib, while Forman described it as a carpenter’s workshop. The structure was likely repurposed many times; it included chunks of sturdy eighteenth-century English brown stoneware alongside animal bones, confirming that it may have been a work building for carpenters and suggesting that skilled slaves here likely lived in the same places that they worked. A third structure, which does not appear on Forman’s map, may have been a makeshift dwelling or lean-to, and yielded hundreds of hand-wrought nails and a posthole. They have also found, throughout the dig sites, broken tools, parts of carriages, and what appears to be a hitching post. Under the tree, the team also found and quickly reburied a more than 2,000-year-old Native American grave, and there are probably more like it.

With the three structures, the archaeologists began to piece together the bustling green Douglass described. “Everything, to a detail, appears to be exactly what he said it was,” says Kraus, citing the presence of workshops, smaller unmapped huts or lean-tos, and crowded dwellings occupied over many years, side-by-side and all within sight of the master’s and overseer’s houses.

It was a little nation by itself, having its own language, its own rules, regulations, and customs. The troubles and controversies arising here were not settled by the civil power of the State. The overseer was the important dignitary. He was generally accuser, judge, jury, advocate, and executioner. The criminal was always dumb—and no slave was allowed to testify, other than against his brother slave. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS

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To the people of Unionville, the finds at Wye House Farm, while not spectacular, are a tangible link with a past that is much discussed but largely forgotten, one that lingers in unheard African-American voices and the modest homes of Unionville. “It’s an exploration of the history of modern social issues,” says Kraus. “It doesn’t make people comfortable and happy, but they are interested.”

Just days after the dig ended for 2006, the team presented their finds to the people of Unionville at the Roberts family reunion, an annual event that draws hundreds of Unionvillians from here and around the country. According to William Roberts, a self-professed “poor county boy” from Unionville who is now president and CEO of Verizon Maryland, as many as 60 percent of the people at the reunion are likely to have ancestors who worked at Wye House Farm. In the domestic remains of his ancestors, Roberts says, he found strength. “So many people today do so little with so much, and they did so much with so little,” he says. “If we’ve overcome this, there’s no excuse for us not being able to overcome anything today.” His 16-year-old niece, Ariel Roberts-Brown, found beauty. “When you find a little button or a little bead that perhaps was a necklace, you learn that something mattered to them,” she says.

“It was like someone recognizing that we existed then,” says Harriette Lowery, who grew up in Unionville and returned to live there when her grandparents passed away. “It was almost like touching them.”

The people of Unionville may not have found the answers to their questions about Africa and spirituality (although those questions were answered to some extent in Annapolis, where Leone found spirit caches, collections of beads, crystals, and pins buried nears hearths and doorways, but this interaction, says Kraus, is central to the project. “I think archaeology runs on public interest,” she says.

According to Kraus, this social archaeology is about reclaiming a history and carrying on Douglass’s legacy. “Frederick Douglass’s project was to enfranchise the disenfranchised,” she says. “He’s part of a tradition of black scholarship that’s been overlooked by archaeologists doing African-American archaeology.” Even if Douglass at times exaggerated the brutality of slave life in Maryland, as some including Tilghman, Leone, and many scholars surmise, he was providing a voice to the voiceless. Social archaeology can do the same thing. Through a story of slavery and cruelty, Douglass provided a discourse on freedom; archaeology, by bringing free African Americans in direct contact with their enslaved ancestors, can help reclaim the trials of slave life as sources of strength.

“The more it is open to us, the more we can heal from it,” says Lowery.

Later in life, when Douglass was well-known and widely respected, he returned by steamer to Wye House Farm as a free man. As he was entertained by a Lloyd family descendant, he saw, in the same place he knew as a child, a dramatically different world.

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I found the buildings, which gave it the appearance of a village, nearly all standing, and I was astonished to find that I had carried their appearance and location so accurately in my mind during so many years. . . . From this we were invited to what was called by the slaves the Great House—the mansion of the Lloyds, and were helped to chairs upon its stately veranda, where we could have a full view of its garden, with its broad walks, hedged with box and adorned with fruit trees and flowers of almost every variety. A more tranquil and tranquilizing scene I have seldom met in this or any other country. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Samir S. Patel is deputy editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.