An Archaeological Overview and Assessment of the
Main Unit, Petersburg National Battlefield, Virginia

Chapter One:  Introduction

By 1861, the cultural landscape that surrounded Petersburg, Virginia, was one of large eighteenth-century plantations and many more small farms with modest houses.  Only one-third of the landowners in Prince George County east of Petersburg in 1860 owned slaves; the median value of a house was approximately $350.  The old plantations on the colonial roads leading to Petersburg were exceptional in terms of age, size, value, and in the numbers of slaves who labored for the plantation owners.  A number of small plantations and farms with small groupings and slaves and modest houses, though still above the median value, emerged in the nineteenth century, and some of those were also located east of town.  Petersburg had developed as an important junction of transportation routes in central Virginia and as a regional center for the production of flour, cotton textiles, and tobacco products.

The Civil War came late to Petersburg, but its effects were devastating to the town and the surrounding agricultural landscape.  The meager Confederate earthen defenses east and south of the town were overrun by advancing Union troops on June 15, 1864, but the Union forces failed to capture the town and its rail supply lines that sustained the Confederate government and eastern military establishment in Richmond.  The resulting Union siege from June 1864 until early April 1865 led directly to the abandonment of Petersburg, the loss of Richmond, collapse of the Confederate government, and the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox.

When the Union Army of the Potomac left Petersburg in early April to stalk the retreating Confederate troops, they left behind a badly-damaged town and a rural landscape that would never return, indeed could never return, to the patterns that had directed economic and social life in Virginia for nearly two centuries.  The population demographics had also forever changed: prior to the Civil War, 63 % of the residents in Prince George County were enslaved African-Americans.  After April 1865, these individuals were no longer "property" but were seeking to build lives as manufacturing workers in Petersburg and other towns and cities, as small landowners or tenant farmers in the county, or as wage laborers for former slave owners.  These events—the emergence and growth of slave plantations and farms, the destruction of these properties during a siege composed of short periods of incredibly violent fighting separated by long periods of boredom and exposure, and the postwar reshaping of the landscape—are well represented in the archaeological record of the Main Unit of Petersburg National Battlefield (Figure 1-1).

However, the Main Unit has been the scene of prehistoric human occupation for thousands of years and of historic occupation certainly since the mid-eighteenth century.  This study presents an overview and assessment of these occupations from an archaeological standpoint.  The research was funded by the National Park Service's Systemwide Archaeological Inventory Program and was undertaken via a cooperative agreement between the National Park Service and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland.  The data were gathered from various sources, including previously recorded prehistoric site locations and historical records such as maps, Virginia tax accounts, and Federal Census schedules.  Surface surveys were also undertaken in January and March 1999, but visibility was limited since the area is presently either heavily wooded or covered with grass.  No subsurface excavations were conducted for the purposes of this survey, although former University of Maryland graduate students Gail Brown and Michael Wilkens did conduct a limited excavation in the summer of 1999.

The overview and assessment will examine historical evidence, the extensive archaeological database from the immediate vicinity, and regional cultural context to evaluate the archaeological potential within the Main Unit.  It will be argued that an important element of the archaeological/historical/cultural record is the surviving landscape.  The anthropological perspective promoted herein argues that "landscape" is reflected in natural and cultural remnants that may be exposed and recorded by researchers, was shaped by activities such as agricultural practices that formed the economic basis of existence but left no obvious physical remains, and is interpreted by conceptions of the past that are often conditioned by concerns in the present.  This overview and assessment will, as a consequence, seek a broader cultural context for the prehistoric and particularly the historic occupations in the Petersburg vicinity.

This study will examine the prehistoric and historical archaeological database of the Main Unit by addressing concerns defined in the scope of work for the overview and assessment of the Main Unit:

     Describe the area's environmental and culture history: Chapter Two provides a brief summary of current environmental conditions relating to drainage patterns, topography, and soil conditions.  Chapter Three describes climatic and vegetation changes from the late Pleistocene through the Holocene interstadial and provides cultural background information relating to prehistoric occupation.  Aspects of historic occupation—chronology of settlement, patterns of land ownership, military struggles, specific features of the physical landscape, economic and social dimensions—are examined in Chapters Four and Five.