Archaeological Sites

Archaeology in Annapolis has excavated nearly 40 sites in Annapolis, Maryland since 1981. Its members opened the first sites to the public in Maryland using an early NEH grant. This early effort at public interpretation introduced the idea that "the past is thought up, not just dug up." The members showed that 17th- and 18th-century planned landscapes were volumes controlling sight through optical illusions, not only maps for dividing land and for traffic. Its members conducted the first African American archaeology in the city and reconstructed the earliest parts of the African elements in African American churches. The data behind these discoveries constitute the core of the collections in this proposal. Annapolis, Maryland, founded as capital of the colony of Maryland in 1695, remains the capital today, a city of 38,000 people and the permanent home of the U.S. Naval Academy. It is historically important because it was home to all four Maryland signers of the Declaration of Independence, capital of the United States from November 1783 to June 1784, and was where General George Washington resigned his military commission to lead the Revolutionary Army, thus demonstrating the primacy of civilian rule in our new country. Annapolis was a center of free African American culture, with a large free community before 1865, and has been a third African American since 1750. It is where Thurgood Marshall took up and won the right of African American public school teachers to receive equal pay in 1939 (Mills v. Board of Education of Anne Arundel County).

Annapolis has never been burned, raided, or sacked. Most of it has not been torn down for urban renewal. It is all there architecturally, in terms of its historical archives and public records, and virtually all of its archaeology. It has over 50 18th-century buildings, 1000 19th-century buildings, virtually all of its land records since the 1730s, and is largely intact in its below-ground archaeological remains. Almost anywhere one excavates, the stratigraphy is intact down through the 18th century. The following provides a list of each archaeological site excavated by AiA and a link to the archaeological site report for each site.

	Index	Site Code	Site Name	Location	Report	Catalog	Summary