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Hidden Lives: The Archaeology of Slave Life at Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest. By BARBARA J. HEATH. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999. x, 81 pp. $12.50 paper.
In the year 1766, a Bedford County court ordered planter John Wayles to employ his bondmen on the public road (in the first extant mention of slaves in the region). Seven years later, when Wayles died at the age of fifty-eight, his son-in-law Thomas Jefferson inherited 135 slaves and just more than eleven thousand acres of land, including the estate Jefferson would name Poplar Forest. Since 1993, archaeologists have labored to reconstruct slave life along the hillside just east of the grove. What they have discovered is the subject of this slim but illuminating account by Barbara J. Heath, the director of archaeology at the site.
Because most enslaved African Americans were part of the so-called historically inarticulate, their lives come to us secondhand, filtered through the account books...