Mass burials in England attest to a turbulent time, and perhaps a notorious medieval massacre
By NADIA DURRANI
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
On November 13, A.D. 1002, Æthelred Unræd, ruler of the English kingdom of Wessex, “ordered slain all the Danish men who were in England,” according to a royal charter. This drastic step was not taken on a whim, but was the product of 200 years of Anglo-Saxon frustration and fear. Vikings, who had long plagued the Isles with raids and wars, had taken over the north and begun settling there. Concerns were growing that they had designs on Æthelred’s southern realm as well.
Æthelred’s order led to what is known as the St. Brice’s Day Massacre, named for the saint’s feast day on which it fell. The event has long been cloaked in mystery and misinformation. Archaeology, so far, has had little to offer in the matter of what actually happened and how many people died that day, but two mass burials recently unearthed are beginning to expose this turbulent period around the end of the first millennium. Could they be the first archaeological evidence of the massacre? Or might they offer a glimpse into some other aspect of the conflict between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings? Archaeologists are examining a trail of clues, including historical sources, wound patterns, and isotopic analysis of teeth, to put what was no doubt a violent series of deaths into perspective.
The Vikings of popular imagination were raiders and pillagers in longboats and (mythical) horned helmets, but the term “Viking” also refers to the farming, trading, crafting, exploring Scandinavian culture from which these raiders came. The Vikings that attacked and settled England and France were, for the most part, from or identified with Denmark. (The Norwegians went north and west, and the Swedes east, though there was a lot of movement of people among the Viking territories.) Viking raids in England began in the late eighth century A.D. and led to the fall of England’s northern kingdoms. Many of the Danish settlers were warriors granted land as a reward for success in battle. The only Anglo-Saxon holdout was Wessex, a powerful and wealthy kingdom that controlled most of the south of the island. An 878 treaty established the boundaries of Wessex and the Danish-controlled area, known as the Danelaw.
There is much discussion among historians about the nature of the relationship between the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes. Many of the new settlers had once been warriors, but they eventually brought along their families. The Danes farmed, traded, and even intermarried with the Anglo-Saxon population, and their cultural influence can be seen in language, place names, and surnames that persist in England today. Some historians argue that there weren’t all that many Danish settlers and that they assimilated many local traditions and beliefs. But there was likely some tension and resentment between the Danish settlers and the Anglo-Saxons (who, ironically, were also descended from continental invaders).
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Burial Pit, ca. 960-1020, St. John's College, Oxford
Relations between Wessex and the Viking superstate of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark had deteriorated by the time of Æthelred’s reign. Peace was purchased with tens of thousands of pounds of silver—protection money called Danegeld—paid to the Viking king, Sweyn Forkbeard. The threat of more raids, armies, and conquests from the Viking homelands continued to vex Æthelred. In 1002, rumors reached the king, who would come to be known as “Æthelred the ill-advised,” stating that the Danes were planning his ouster. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a somewhat biased tenth-century account, “it was told the king, that they would beshrew him of his life, and afterwards all his council, and then have his kingdom without any resistance.” His reaction was to order the death of every Danish man on the island’s soil.
Contemporary historians believe that the massacre was limited to recent migrants and members of the Danish elite outside the Danelaw (where a massacre would have been unlikely), but no one knows just how many people died. Politically, the order achieved little for the king. Its main outcome was the alienation of Danes working for him and, the following year, a brutal retaliation by Forkbeard.
According to later literary sources, Forkbeard was particularly enraged by the death of his sister, her husband, and their child in the massacre. The story goes that they and other fleeing Danes had sought sanctuary in St. Frideswide’s Church in Oxford (now Christ Church Cathedral). As Æthelred recorded in a royal charter, “When all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and its books.” Those who did not die inside, sources state, were killed by their pursuers as they tried to escape.
Almost exactly 1,000 years later, archaeologists in England discovered two mass burials containing the remains of dozens of young men who had been slaughtered or executed. Are these bodies the first archaeological evidence for the St. Brice’s Day Massacre? Or are they victims of another sort?
The first mass grave was found in 2008 by archaeologists digging on the grounds of St. John’s College. One of the University of Oxford’s richest and oldest colleges, St. John’s was about to build new student accommodation, and since British planning regulations require an archaeological assessment ahead of new construction, a team from Thames Valley Archaeological Services (TVAS), directed by Sean Wallis, was called in.
The team first found the previously unknown remains of one of Britain’s largest Neolithic henges, almost 500 feet in diameter. The find immediately changed the perception of prehistoric Oxford from a rather insignificant ford across the Thames to potentially one of the most important ritual sites in southern England. The henge’s eight-foot-deep ditch had become, by the medieval period, a dump for waste, including broken pottery and food scraps. It was there, in the garbage-filled ditch, that the team found the remains of 37 people.
All the bodies in the grave appear to have been male (though two were too young for their sex to be determined), and most were between 16 and 25 years old. As a group, they were tall, taller than the average Anglo-Saxon at the time, and strong, judging by the large muscle-attachment areas of their bones. Despite their physical advantages, all these men appear to have met violent ends. One had been decapitated, and attempts at decapitation had seemingly been made on five others. Twenty-seven suffered broken or cracked skulls. The back and pelvic bones of 20 bodies bore stab marks, as did the ribs of a dozen others. A number of the skeletons had evidence of charring, indicating that they were burned prior to burial.
Bone specialist Ceri Falys of TVAS began piecing together the fragmented skulls and skeletons. Osteologists such as Falys employ the skills and techniques of forensic pathologists, and can tell from damage done to bones not just how people died, but also how they were attacked, from what direction, and even with what level of ferocity. Falys saw that the damage to the bones revealed a frenzied attack, but not the sort one would expect from a traditional medieval battle. Instead, her meticulous work revealed that many of the men appear to have been attacked from all sides. For example, one victim suffered wounds to both his skull and pelvis, suggesting he had been attacked both from behind and from the side, by at least two different people. “The injuries I observed were not the result of men involved in hand-to-hand combat,” says Falys. “In such cases, we would expect to find cut marks on the forearms and hands as the person raises their arms to defend. Instead, I believe these wounds were the result of undefended people running away from their attackers.”
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Burial Pit, ca. 960-1020, St. John's College, Oxford
Radiocarbon analysis of the bones dates them to around 960 to 1020—England’s later Anglo-Saxon period, including the reign of Æthelred. Wallis and his excavation team were convinced, in part because of the evidence of the burning of the remains, that they had discovered a mass grave from St. Brice’s Day 1002.
In 2009, to extract yet more information from the bones, scientists from the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at the University of Oxford, led by Mark Pollard, carried out chemical analysis of collagen from the bones and enamel from the teeth of some of the individuals. The techniques included carbon and nitrogen stable-isotope analysis of bone collagen, which is widely used to study diet and migration, and strontium and oxygen isotopic analysis of dental enamel, a powerful indicator of where an individual spent his or her early life. Pollard concluded that the victims had diets with a substantial amount of seafood—somewhat more than is found in the diets of the local population at the time. This supported the notion that the dead were indeed foreign to the British Isles. Although it was obvious that the men had been slaughtered, Pollard did not feel there was enough evidence to prove that they were victims of the St. Brice’s Day Massacre.
The investigation took a twist when Pollard compared his analysis with research on a second set of early medieval skeletons. These other bodies had been found in June 2009, in a burial pit at Ridgeway Hill, near the seaside town of Weymouth in Dorset, southern England. Weymouth was then set to host the sailing events for the 2012 Olympic Games, so a relief road was being built around the town to handle traffic. A team from the independent archaeological organization Oxford Archaeology discovered a pit similar to the one in Oxford, containing the remains of 54 men who had met violent ends. Almost all had been young and fit when they died. In this case, each of them had been beheaded, and a stash of skulls was found buried separately. Angela Boyle, senior osteologist at Oxford Archaeology, directed the skeletal analysis and found that most of the men were wounded exclusively in the upper spine and cranial area, a pattern consistent with execution. However, Boyle observed very few other injuries, such as defensive wounds to the arms or hands, again suggesting the men had been summarily killed, rather than having fallen in battle.
She also discovered that one of the men had incisions in his teeth, a painful dental modification associated with Viking mercenaries. Some scholars believe that such dental incisions may have been filled with colored pigment to make them appear more frightening. This practice could explain the origin of nicknames such as “Bluetooth.” One man who carried this moniker was Harald Bluetooth, described in two Nordic sources as founder of the Jomsvikings, a group of warriors so notorious across Europe that they spawned their own saga. “I am content to die as are all our comrades. But I will not let myself be slaughtered like a sheep,” says one Viking in the Jomsviking saga. “I would rather face the blow. Strike straight at my face and watch carefully if I pale at all.”
According to Britt Baillie of the University of Cambridge, who has been working on the interpretation of the burial, the men there are more likely to have been inspired by the saga than they are to have been characters in it. “The Jomsviking story seems to have been in active circulation around the turn of the millennium, so my theory is that the men on the Ridgeway wanted to emulate the bravery depicted in the saga, although alleged ‘Jomsvikings’ are said to have been operating in England at the time,” she says. “But how they were rounded up without suffering more wounds is unknown.”
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Burial Pit, ca. 960-1020, St. John's College, Oxford
Evidence from the burial suggests that these men were being made examples of. They were beheaded in a peculiar way—from the front, facing the blow. They were executed by sword instead of by ax, and had been stripped—both activities that are associated with the execution of high-status warriors. In fact, the execution may have had an audience, having taken place at a prominent point where the Roman road and the Ridgeway path intersected. Because fewer skulls than bodies have been found, some heads may have been displayed on stakes at the site.
Isotopic analysis of these remains by Jane Evans and Carolyn Chenery at NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory, part of the British Geological Survey, shows that the men originated from a variety of places across the Viking territory. The isotopes in their teeth confirmed that, like the remains found in Oxford, the men grew up in countries colder than Britain, with one individual thought to be from north of the Arctic Circle, and that the men had eaten a diet high in protein, another marker of Scandinavian origin. Radiocarbon analysis returned dates of between 980 and 1030 for their deaths—broadly contemporary with the St. Brice’s Day Massacre. Here was a group that may or may not have been victims of Æthelred’s order. Regardless, they were clearly not settlers, but rather Viking mercenaries or warriors of some sort.
Pollard saw undeniable parallels between the Oxford and Weymouth mass graves. The collagen isotopic results are comparable, and the sex, age, and stature of the dead are similar. The dead were all foreign migrants. To Pollard the similarities between the two groups were too much to ignore. He believes the Oxford group was, like the Weymouth group, a collection of professional warriors and raiders—not “innocent” settlers cut down indiscriminately. Though the men buried in Oxford had not been ritualistically executed, they seem to have been killed in a frenzy or rounded up and executed, most likely as revenge for prior raids. “For students of history,” says Pollard, “it is perhaps disappointing that we cannot with certainty corroborate the story of the massacre in Oxford on St. Brice’s Day, at least not with these remains.”
However, the Oxford site’s chief archaeologist, Wallis, remains convinced that the Oxford men were killed by Æthelred’s order in 1002. “We found no defensive wounds. If these were active and professional mercenaries, then why were they unarmed, and why did they not protect themselves? They also seem to have been killed while running away, and some were then exposed to burning, which is precisely what would have happened in the St. Brice’s Day Massacre,” he explains. “At some point the Oxford men may well have been soldiers, and some, probably all, were unambiguously foreign. But, as the historical documents say, these were folk who were deeply resented for having first raided, and then settled among the Saxons.”
To Wallis and his colleagues at TVAS, the men buried in Oxford may have had warriors-turned-settlers among them, who were caught off guard and pursued by an angry mob. He believes they were quite unlike the group of mercenaries or warriors ritualistically executed at Ridgeway Hill in Weymouth.
However, the story remains complicated. Baillie even questions the widespread assumption that the Weymouth men were, in fact, mercenaries at all. “The problem with the Weymouth burials is that the men did not have many old wounds, consistent with having been engaged in earlier battles,” she says. “One would expect that mercenaries would have defended themselves, yet very few of the skeletons display such wounds. Perhaps they were hostages taken from a larger battle. However, it is also possible that those men were also victims of the St. Brice’s Day Massacre, but that their killings were simply carried out in a much more orderly fashion. We will never know for certain.”
Clearly both sets of burials were acts of vengeance, products of the resentment that had built among the Anglo-Saxons as they saw their erstwhile attackers become, in some cases, their neighbors. Archaeology has offered some insight into the period, but for now, the story surrounding the St. Brice’s Day Massacre will remain contested.
Nadia Durrani is an archaeologist, editor, and coauthor, with Brian Fagan, of In the Beginning and People of the Earth.
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Burial Pit, ca. 960-1020, St. John's College, Oxford
Body art has been a meaningful form of expression throughout the ages
By JARRETT A. LOBELL and ERIC A. POWELL
Wednesday, October 09, 2013
The practice of adorning the body with images and symbols has become nearly ubiquitous in our time, and the reasons for getting a tattoo are enormously varied and highly personal. It was no less so in antiquity as can be seen in this survey of body art that spans thousands of years and an array of cultures—each a unique demonstration of the ways in which peoples across the globe chose to express themselves.
Open for only six weeks toward the end of the Civil War, Camp Lawton preserves a record of wartime prison life
By MARGARET SHAKESPEARE
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Camp Lawton had been on the mind of John Derden, a professor emeritus of history at East Georgia College, for decades, ever since he visited Magnolia Springs State Park in 1973. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources had turned the springs, which produce seven million gallons of crystal-clear water a day, into a state park in 1939. Some 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, Magnolia Springs is also the location of Camp Lawton, a surprisingly undisturbed Civil War site, where Confederate forces, for a brief time, imprisoned Union enlisted men.
“When I made that first visit, I saw a tablet in the park about the camp,” Derden recalls. He discovered that some rudimentary archaeological surveys—a few shovel tests over the years—had essentially turned up no remains from the nineteenth century. Only some of the surrounding earthworks, where manned munitions had been mounted and aimed menacingly toward the prison population, still stood. Derden, like pretty much everyone else, assumed no significant remains were left to help advance any chronicle of the camp and its inhabitants.
Nonetheless convinced of a worthy narrative, Derden plugged away at putting one together, relying on other sources, such as diaries and letters from the time, including the drawings and accounts of Private Robert Knox Sneden, a Union prisoner in the camp. Derden’s research revealed that Camp Lawton, a functioning prison for only six weeks, would end up being burned to the ground at the hands of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman in December 1864 as the Civil War drew toward its end. The prison had held upwards of 10,000 individuals on more than 42 acres fortified by an imposing pine-log stockade. Of those 10,000 Union prisoners, more than 700 died during their brief time at Camp Lawton. The survivors were evacuated in a hasty nighttime maneuver just one month before Sherman swept through the region. After these events, the camp was pretty much forgotten.
Derden’s scholarship resulted in a completed manuscript, The World’s Largest Prison: The Story of Camp Lawton. As it was about sent to the publisher in 2010, in an interesting twist, Derden and other historians, archaeologists, Civil War buffs, and locals were stunned to learn that Kevin Chapman, a graduate student at nearby Georgia Southern University, just 40 minutes down the road from the site, not only had discovered intriguing Civil War–era artifacts, but also had successfully located pieces of the prison’s burned stockade wall. As news hit The New York Times, CNN, and other national outlets, Derden had just enough time to tuck a final chapter into his book. Excavation of the site then cranked into full gear, led by Lance Greene, an assistant professor of anthropology at Georgia Southern, with Derden serving as an ad hoc adviser and expert. Archaeological evidence can now be brought to bear on nuances of daily subsistence in a community that existed for a mere month and a half in the fall of 1864. “This might be the last chance to look at a debate that still rages,” says Greene. “Who was to blame for dying prisoners? Were Confederates trying to starve them out?” Looking for answers to these questions is just a piece of the effort. The archaeologists are also searching for clues as to whether life was better or worse, depending on which side of the stockade wall a person found himself.
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Camp Lawton's Stockade and Forgotten Population
A Civil War POW Camp in Watercolor
Confederate Brigadier General John H. Winder, ultimately promoted to commissary general of prisons east of the Mississippi, established his headquarters at Camp Lawton, reckoning it was “the largest prison in the world.” Its inmate population, guards, administrators, and all the rest, almost to a person, had been relocated from the notorious Camp Sumter, familiarly known as Andersonville, on the other side of the state. Even in its day, Andersonville was widely held as a symbol of POW suffering at its worst. Of the 45,000 Union prisoners that passed through its gates, 13,000 died of dysentery, scurvy, starvation, or violence at the hands of Confederate guards. Winder and other Confederate leaders hoped to alleviate the inhumane overcrowding and the ever-worsening conditions. In the summer of 1864, they accelerated the design and construction of Camp Lawton, which would be twice the size of Andersonville and located near the town of Millen.
Nearly 150 years later, Greene and his team are trying to determine if Camp Lawton did in fact improve prisoner conditions, as Winder said he intended. A seemingly endless array of artifacts—fistfuls by the day are pulled from the earth at several dig sites—is providing the clues to figuring out what life at Camp Lawton was like. The team, says Greene, is currently conducting large-scale excavations that are uncovering the exact locations and construction techniques of both the stockade and structures outside it, as well as personal shelters called “shebangs” that Union prisoners built within its walls. “We have identified what we think was a Confederate barracks area outside the stockade and that will let us compare the lives of prisoners and Confederate soldiers,” says Greene. “We hope to find out about the food they ate, and if they traded with their captors.”
Camp Lawton is unique among Civil War POW sites in that almost the entire length of the stockade is largely intact. Little archaeology has been done at Andersonville, for instance, because, as elsewhere, looters took much of what remained immediately following the war. “As far as we can tell, only the northwest corner of the stockade at Camp Lawton has been disturbed—by road construction of a four-lane highway,” Greene explains. “There are no other POW camps with this kind of preservation. The scale of what is at Lawton is enough for years of work.”
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Camp Lawton's Stockade and Forgotten Population
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By 9 a.m. the temperature breaks 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Its partner in midsummer misery-making, humidity, hangs so heavily that breathing seems a chore. Squadrons of no-see-ums, gnats, and mosquitoes, trademark pests of the rural deep South, bite through multiple applications of insect repellant. About a dozen Georgia Southern students mop away streams of sweat and gather their shovels, trowels, buckets, screens, measures, and notebooks. In the oppressive heat, they scoop up and sort out the remains of Camp Lawton.
So far, the site hosts three separate excavation areas, two of which are within Magnolia Springs State Park. The third dig site is on adjacent wooded land north and west of the park that was formerly a U.S. Fish and Wildlife hatchery. This is where the forgotten shebangs, constructed of bricks by Union prisoners, were found. The team refers to this location as the “Federal side,” and, so far, it has offered up the greatest number of artifacts. Archaeologists have found numerous buttons, both military and civilian; suspender buckles; 1864 pennies, grocer’s tokens, and other coins; a picture frame; and tin cans and lids.
The stockade that encompassed the Federal side, and encloses part of the current Magnolia Springs, was massive. Most of the prisoners likely lived on the Federal side, where the land was higher and drier. Drawings made by Sneden during his short time at Camp Lawton confirm this. He depicts the bulk of prisoner squats as concentrated in the northern section of the stockade. Greene notes that the Sneden drawings have been a “wonderful resource” for the team, especially in providing a general layout for the site. As Sneden drew it, the stockade was rectangular. “Because his goal was to show the entire camp in a few drawings, he did have to skew the landscape a bit,” Greene says. “The hills are a little more prominent and things are pushed together.” Archaeologists are now working to identify the precise location of the corner in the southern section. They should then be able to tell if the stockade was actually square, as most of them believe it was, rather than rectangular.
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Camp Lawton's Stockade and Forgotten Population
A Civil War POW Camp in Watercolor
With Sneden’s drawings as context, evidence from the digs is allowing a rough but poignant understanding of prisoner life to emerge quickly. The bricks that prisoners used to build their shebangs inside the stockade were first thought to be the remains of five or more large ovens that were known to have been provided by the Confederates for prisoners to cook their rations. However, according to Greene, the prisoners never cooked in them. Graduate student Ryan Sipe notes, “Now all evidence points to prisoners stealing bricks from the ovens to use in their own shebang construction.” To build these shelters, prisoners would dig a shallow pit and line it with bricks. They would then drape a blanket over it, tent-like, using rope and sticks, or construct a crude lean-to. A firm foundation on the ground seems to have been the most comfortable shelter a prisoner could expect. While seemingly minimal, it was a step up from Andersonville, where the ground was vermin-infested and overcrowding meant that 10 men might share headroom under makeshift tents.
Excavators are going down in roughly four-inch increments in the shebangs, where they’ve discovered charred animal bones. The team expects further screening of the dirt to turn up more bone fragments. Testing will determine if prisoners, hunkered down in their pitifully threadbare quarters, ate bones that had been softened by fire. If that’s the case, it would verify that the meat rations for inmates were indeed minimal cuts.
Greene’s excavations have also turned up railroad spikes. Spikes could be filed down and used for digging tools, but it is not clear how the prisoners would have acquired them. Nearly all prisoners were transported by rail from Andersonville. They might have changed trains several times before arriving at the Lawtonville stop, a half-mile march from their new place of imprisonment. While in the shuffle of being boarded on and off rail cars, captives could have helped themselves to whatever debris might have seemed to be of use.
Greene has also found spoons, about four inches long, with the handles bent at almost a 90-degree angle, no doubt used as “a tool of some kind.” The team has also located parts of scissors, pockets knives, lead bullets carved into nipples to keep powder dry, bullets cut for chess pieces, heel taps, key rings, knapsack hooks, and many service buttons (usually marked by the manufacturer and, hence, easy to trace). Electrolysis labs, some set up in the field, are removing rust from the metal artifacts, and a local veterinarian has volunteered to X-ray some of the more fragile and excessively rusted items.
By contrast, much of what has been found on the Magnolia Springs side of the excavation is on land that formerly surrounded the pen and was not occupied by prisoners. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that the area was occupied by Confederate forces during this period, as opposed to being used for farming or as civilian homesteads. Greene says the team is finding a lot of cut nails, typical of nineteenth-century construction, indicating there were once wooden buildings there, likely Confederate barracks for enlisted men or the Camp Lawton headquarters. “The Sneden maps and diary show that there were a lot of military buildings between the Lawtonville railroad depot and the stockade,” Greene explains. “Also, there are several artifacts that we recovered that appear much more commonly on Civil War–era military sites than on farmsteads from the period.” For example, a percussion cap from a rifle, a brass keg-tap, the brass cylinder from the end of a large parasol or tent, and early rifle cartridges all suggest a military presence. “We are also finding shoe eyelets, horse tack, bridle rings, undecorated whiteware, pottery sherds, and glass,” he notes.
The enormous disparity in the types of archaeological remains found inside and outside the stockade points to very different lifestyles for Union prisoners and Confederate soldiers. Sneden, in his journal, confirms that prisoners didn’t have any ceramics or glass. “So they used tin cans instead,” says Greene. “And we have found lots of those, although not always in good shape because the soils are so acidic.”
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The idea that the livesof prisoners were much worse than those of their captors at a POW camp seems like a safe assumption to make. But archaeological evidence from another Civil War prison camp, Johnson’s Island, Ohio, in Lake Erie, where Union forces held Confederate prisoners from 1862 to 1865, suggests that wasn’t always the case. David Bush, professor of anthropology at Heidelberg University in northern Ohio, says of his 25 years of investigation at the site, “We don’t have a lot of dialogue on the how and why, but the results speak to a desire for Johnson’s Island to be humane housing—soldier housing as for any soldier.”
By contrast with Camp Lawton, contract labor built 13 wooden buildings at Johnson’s Island, complete with cook stoves, heating stoves, windows, and bunk beds in each. What’s more, the detained Confederate occupants, mostly officers, furnished themselves with china, crystal, fine cutlery, and other high-end accoutrements to which they were accustomed. They received $100 checks from home and could spend lavishly on whatever the sutler, the civilian grocer located within the camp, offered. “We don’t have archaeological records for their guards, but it is my hypothesis that there was a disparity, that the guards had a lesser lifestyle than the prisoners,” says Bush. After all, the guards earned only $13 a month.
Bush says he’s anxious to see what will come up at Camp Lawton. The discovery of the shebangs, in particular, interests him. It creates a basis for comparing lifestyles in a tight time period and is useful for seeing how prisoners tried to tend to their own well-being. Derden notes that Bush’s work at Johnson’s Island turned up examples of ingenuity among the POWs, such as the manufacture of hard rubber jewelry while confined. “As the Camp Lawton dig continues, I think we will see more evidence of resourcefulness—already we see it in the pilferage of bricks.” In addition, and as important, Derden says, “The textual and archaeological exploration of Camp Lawton will allow us to examine the prison economy, an economy that involves the camp sutler, as well as trading between guards and inmates, and inmates and inmates.” Says Eric Leonard, chief of interpretation and education at Andersonville National Historic Site, “Prisons are an entry point to giant stories.”
It is hard to imagine, in this weather, which wilts humans but nourishes corn, peach trees, and other crops, where birdsong and train clatter drift through the woods, that part of the hardship at Camp Lawton came from a freak freeze. A snowstorm lashed the prison close to the time that the short but eventful life of the camp was extinguished.
Margaret Shakespeare is a freelance writer based in New York. To read about the 2013 field season at Johnson’s Island, go to Interactive Digs. Visit the Virginia Historical Society's website to see its collection of Sneden's memoirs.