Slave Quarters Excavated in Savannah

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA—A highway construction project has revealed more than 33,000 artifacts, including a Mexican coin that may have been worn as a pendant, an 1865 penny, pieces of brick, broken dishes and bottles, a cast iron pot, and a brass thimble, from a suspected slave quarters occupied from about 1750 until through the Civil War. Now a wooded area, in the 1850s, the site was a large plantation owned by an attorney named William Miller, who owned 87 slaves. Archaeologist Rita Elliott thinks that the enslaved residents probably lived in windowless wooden houses and stored their belongings in pits in the floors. Military items suggest that the Union Army camped at the site during Sherman’s March in 1864.