By Roslyn Ryan
Editor

If you wanted a picture of patience and perseverance, you could have easily found one a few weeks back in the middle of a dense patch of woods near Tobaccoville.

There, University of Tennessee professor Dr. Barbara Heath and a team of students from UT were well into a five-week exploration of a site once known as Indian Camp.
Operating with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the group was searching for insight into the lives of a group of enslaved Africans who would have lived and worked on the property from the 1730s to the 1750s.

Working from early maps – and the knowledge that most slaves’ quarters were located near the edges of fields, in a flat place near a water source – Heath and her team had set about in search of the kinds of things most people might overlook: buttons, animal bones, pieces of broken glassware– anything that would offer them a glimpse of what life was like for enslaved people in this area. 
Despite the advances of modern science, the grunt work of archeology remains strikingly low-tech. The tools of the trade amount to little more than an educated guess and a shovel. If you don’t find anything in the first hole, you dig another.

For their part, Heath and her group were staying positive; if the proverbial needle in the haystack was where they thought it was, they reasoned, all they had to do was keep searching.
“Chances are it’s out there,” said Heath. “It’s just a question of finding the spot.”

Ultimately, says Heath, she and her team would like to find out more about how the enslaved people of Indian Camp went about their daily lives.
They are interested less in explaining the impact of slavery than in understanding the small ways that people went about adapting to their circumstances.
What they want to do, she said, is “to highlight their humanity.”

Though the five-week dig wrapped up on August 5, Heath said they hope to come back in the near future.

“It’s really exciting,” she said, offering a wry smile as she considered the long hours of digging that lay ahead of her.

“It makes the 1,000 holes worth it.”