Uncovering history: Archaeology at JMU

Dennis Blanton, associate professor of anthropology, made his first significant archaeological find at 13 years old: he found a stone spear point dating to the last Ice Age — more than 13,000 years ago — at a logging site in South Carolina. His love for archaeology has been constant ever since.

Blanton found his latest niche in archaeology researching the impact of the first colonizing Europeans on indigenous societies, trying to fill in a sketchy Spanish colonial history about conquistador Hernando De Soto. Most of his fieldwork takes place at the Deer Run Plantation in southwestern Georgia, where he hosts a field school for JMU students. Students spend five to six weeks camping in tents and working long days as archaeologists, gaining the practical experience of searching, excavating and cataloguing.

Blanton devoted 10 years working on the property, with colleagues and students armed with walkie-talkies and scattered across a full kilometer of land, before they found the first real piece of evidence that the conquistadors had been there. Blanton was busy working on a map when a student called him over the crackling radio: “You need to see this — I think I found something.” In that student’s hand was a glass bead made in Italy 500 years ago, brought by the Spanish to trade with the Native Americans. That bead was the first in a series of finds by Blanton and his students over the years.

“There’s much about the human story that only archaeology can reveal,” says Blanton, and archaeologists have a tremendous responsibility to tell that story and expand our knowledge of the past. Blanton receives several calls a year asking him to lend his expertise, but his own projects and classes limit the time he can offer.

Sometimes, though, the stars align between a local project, his experience and his classes. Now a resident of Staunton, VA, Blanton recently joined the Historic Staunton Foundation’s (HSF) initiative to preserve and restore the Cabell Log House, a two-room dwelling built by a freed African American, Edmund Cabell, shortly after the Civil War. Blanton is working with the HSF to plan an archaeological study that will likely take several years. “Any occasion where I’m invited to aid a local entity, that involves students, I’m all about it.” said Blanton. “It's an opportunity for us at JMU. The site becomes a living laboratory for our students and there was so much excitement about it.”

When the HSF secured the building, enthusiasm was high. “What are we waiting on?” exclaimed HSF director Frank Strassler. “Aren’t you going to go out there and dig some holes?” Blanton promptly brought students to the site, where they found hundreds of artifacts in a single day. IThis fall, he is incorporating the site into one of his courses where students can continue to uncover the house’s rich legacy and “to serve [both the HSF and] the local African American community. To make sure that history is represented, fairly and more prominently, in the valley. We want to do our part to help them fill out that story.”

Blanton’s work is finding pieces of the puzzle that is human history. “My dream is, more than anything, to make sure that whatever it is I choose to do is done well and respected and will reflect well on everyone concerned,” he said. “And also, that I can make a difference, in some meaningful way.”