When Bob Jewell, president and CEO of Brookgreen Gardens, pointed to a storehouse on an 1887 plat of Brookgreen Plantation’s slave settlement and asked Susan McMillan, director of the Waccamaw Archaeology Partnership, to locate it last spring, it sounded like an easy assignment: Here is the store on the map. Now go find it. But it wasn’t until months of digging later that the heavy artifact density—not the 1887 map—told her that her team of volunteer archaeologists had found first the store, and then a cluster of structures likely indicative of a second slave settlement.

Celebrated Southern folklife historian Charles Joyner has demonstrated the importance of asking big questions about small spaces, most famously about slave communities and culture on rice plantations on the Waccamaw Neck. McMillan knows that often the big questions concerning the everyday lives of enslaved laborers can best be answered by studying very small clues uncovered within those small spaces, which in this case are as large as a turkey feed field and usually the size of 9-inch by 18-inch holes, called units, in the ground. Fragments of cheap ceramics and pieces of glass bottles: these are the artifacts that serve as time machines to what McMillan terms the “Old South beneath the sod.”

The current dig, a joint venture of the Waccamaw Archaeology Partnership and the Volunteers of Brookgreen Gardens, began last October with the primary objective of locating the store, a supply house where slaves might have collected daily necessities from field tools to food. The area of investigation is concentrated in the turkey feed field and pine grove across from the overseer’s kitchen and smokehouse site excavated in 1992 on the Lowcountry Trail. The work begins by marking off the area and establishing a grid, staking units at regular intervals based on ground-penetrating radar data and the 1887 map drawn by Marinus Willett, who had mapped other parts of Brookgreen. Then volunteers dig holes and look for soil disturbance—signs of human activity. Wherever a unit yields a higher density of artifacts, satellite units are staked for further investigation and reconnaissance as diggers follow the artifact pattern to the store. As it gets heavier, they know they’re moving in the right direction.

In December the team reached artifact paydirt and knew they’d located some kind of structure. In a single 9-inch by 18-inch hole, more than 100 artifacts were uncovered. “That’s when,” according to McMillan, “you know you’re on a site. No question about it.” This gave strong evidence of the store—approximately 250 feet from the map’s mark. Mean ceramic dates on the shards will allow McMillan to determine if it predates the Civil War; if so, she says, archival materials suggest it probably became a retail establishment afterwards.

The last day of digging in March yielded 600 artifacts in one unit. The pattern suggested a cluster of buildings. A kitchen? A blacksmith shop? A praise house? The second slave village? The artifacts will tell.

Jewell articulates what the archaeologists hope the artifacts will reveal: “more about life on an everyday basis in that village, how it worked. What was everyday other than being enslaved? What did enslaved people do during those hours they did not have to work? How did they live? How did they cope?” Rather than simply finding one particular structure, he notes, “the main goal of the dig is to preserve, collect and interpret artifacts and findings so we do a better job of telling the public what life was like here—what we have here.” And Brookgreen has a lot to work with. By April, when the dig went on hiatus for the summer, the group had dug 290 units and excavated, screened, washed, analyzed and curated 23,849 artifacts.

This tally reflects Brookgreen Plantation’s history as the center of Joshua John Ward’s rice empire, which was managed by his heirs after his death in 1854. At the start of the Civil War, Brookgreen had long been the most productive rice plantation in the country, with the largest rice field acreage in the Southeast and the largest workforce of enslaved laborers in the nation.

So what turns up during a dig on an old plantation? A whole bunch of shells, for starters. Almost half of the artifacts so far are shells, which is not remarkable given Civil War-era photographs that show slave streets heaped with oyster shells. If this seems insignificant, think again: these shells provide valuable information about the diet of Brookgreen slaves and how they supplemented their rations. More than a quarter of the artifacts to date are ceramics, glass and nails. The remainder is largely brick, mortar, daub, window glazing and charcoal.

Interesting “oddities” that tell a more human story include kaoline clay pipe bowls and stems (four dozen of them), buttons, slave pottery known as colonoware, porcelain bisque doll parts, glass beads, a suspender clip, the rim of a bedpan, pocket watch fragments, musical instrument pieces, animal bones, a belt buckle, teeth, a jewelry locket, shoelace grommets, sundry hinges and hardware. One of the most exciting days yielded a metal barrel band encompassing charcoal ash and non-calcined pig bones. Far from being a random list, these objects add up to an artifact footprint, McMillan explains, wholly consistent with a slave village. And they already suggest possible outlines of the village’s story: An old doll handed down to a slave child, an after-work jam session with an instrument similar to the kazoo, lace-up shoes that would’ve been more likely to fit feet of various sizes, an antebellum pig picking on the street.

Despite these discoveries, you won’t see massive excavations at Brookgreen in coming months. McMillan is full of conviction when she explains that archaeology relies on “nonrenewable cultural resources,” which means it’s essential “not to disturb or destroy the site, but to take a peek, to see what was there.” She continues, “As long as something’s underground, it’s not going anywhere. It’s safe for future investigation and less invasive technologies. Once something’s dug up, it could be lost forever.” Losing what’s underground at Brookgreen would be losing part of Brookgreen’s history."

Rich in historical and archaeological resources, as well as in a community of volunteers invested in bringing those resources back to light, there seems no end to what the archaeology group might find.

Digging up historical treasures is undeniably the exciting part, but figuring out what to make of these items, how to fit them together into an accurate interpretation of whom they belonged to and how those people lived, that’s the meaningful part—and the challenge when you’re working with a suspender clip here and a pipe bowl there. Yet these are the materials that reconstruct the past as McMillan’s group will continue to find answers to the big questions next fall, working one small glass bead and grommet at a time.