THE LOST WORLD OF MONTICELLO An Evolutionary Perspective

This essay explores how an evolutionary perspective can help historical archaeologists use archaeological evidence to further our understanding of historical dynamics associated with the global demographic expansions of Europeans and Africans that began in the late fifteenth century. It sketches evolutionary models for some of the economic and social strategies of free and enslaved people that created a slave society in the Chesapeake region in the seventeenth century and conditioned its historical trajectory up to the Civil War. Those strategies informed the choices made by Thomas Jefferson as he developed Monticello Plantation around 1770. Evolutionary models offer tools to unravel the historical significance of subsequent change in slave and elite housing, slave settlement patterns, and agricultural ecology, documented in the archaeological record at Monticello and the region.