In a wooden drying tray about two feet square, with a base made of metal screening, sits a jumble of cleaned, fragmented objects in all shapes, sizes, and colors. At first, it’s difficult to determine what they even are, or if their source is natural or manufactured. But just like when we stare at art, or the night sky, patience is rewarded. On one dark-colored piece, I notice a faint pattern, a remnant of whatever tool was used to make it. Other sherds gleam white, nearly pristine, as if their owner held the item just yesterday. In the center lies a pair of some animal’s teeth, still connected to their roots.

“We’re telling a double story here,” says Trish Lowe Smith, Drayton Hall’s director of preservation and archives. “The story of both the Drayton family and the enslaved community.”

From the outset, Drayton Hall has set itself apart from other historic house museums—places like Mount Vernon, Monticello, and others—by preserving and showing the house just as it was when the National Trust acquired it. This means visitors see no furniture when they walk through the interior—no damask curtains and few velvet ropes. What they do see are the symmetrical double staircase, the ornamental carved plaster on the ceilings, the abundant windows, and those spaces that were meant to be hidden: an enclosed spiral staircase for enslaved workers and the cramped cellar rooms where about a dozen enslaved people lived at a time. “Drayton Hall is my favorite historic place,” Cynthia Liccese-Torres, a professional preservationist in Arlington, Virginia, recently told me, “because the house speaks for itself.”

Now, through Drayton Hall’s newly comprehensive archaeology program, which includes the 2-year-old Conservation Lab; the Stephen and Laura Gates Exhibit Gallery, a dedicated space for artifacts, furnishings, and interpretative panels; and the hiring of two full-time archaeology staff, the hope is that the ground will offer new stories, as well. “We almost have as many artifacts as we have dirt,” Smith says. “We have a collection of about 1,500 objects in the architectural fragment collection that we occasionally clean, repair, or display in the Conservation Lab.” (Objects not on display at the Conservation Lab or Gates Gallery are temporarily stored at an offsite conservation center, though the hope is that Drayton Hall will one day have its own storage facility.) The site’s preservation and archaeology departments share the Lab, and a typical day might see the sorting and cleaning of artifacts or the creation of custom mounts for exhibits.

On a recent spring morning, Smith showed me some of what’s on display in the Gates Gallery: Plate fragments from the 18th century; pieces of 18th-century colonoware, a type of low-fire earthenware most often made by enslaved people; decorative blue-and-white Delft tiles that lined the interiors of Drayton’s fireplaces; pieces of the sash pulley systems used in the windows, and much more. Smith stopped before one display case to point out something else, too: a branding iron spelling out the name “Drayton,” designed for searing human flesh. Intentionally, the branding iron is displayed before a large map depicting the full extent of Drayton’s South Carolina landholdings, part of a vast dominion of wealth and power built on enslaved labor.

Charles Drayton, one of John’s sons and a prolific diarist, mentioned enslaved workers regularly in his journals, providing much of the concrete information that exists about the enslaved population of Drayton Hall. This group included bricklayers, to whom the fingerprints visible on some of the bricks in the main house likely belonged. “John Phaley, bricklayer finished my reverbarotory Furnace for burning shells to Lime,” Charles wrote in 1798. “… The Furnace took him & my brick-layer Carolina, 10 days to lay the bricks—including Carolina one day to deepen the hole into the earth.”

In 2021, Drayton Hall hired its first full-time director of archaeology and collections, Luke Pecoraro. With archaeological experience at Mount Vernon, Jamestown, and other historic sites, Pecoraro has applied both traditional fieldwork and technology-based imaging at Drayton Hall as part of a long-term effort to locate where slave dwellings existed on the property and to discern how these and other long-disappeared spaces inform our understanding of the Draytons, those they enslaved, and others. This includes the Native Americans who lived on the site before European settlement, as well as the convict laborers and formerly enslaved people who worked in the phosphate mines that existed on the property after the Civil War and into the early 20th century.

The duality of the narrative at Drayton Hall is in keeping with a sea change in how plantations around the South are interpreted, including places like the Whitney Plantation outside New Orleans, where the history of slavery dominates and the story of the enslavers is sidelined. “The digitization and availability of plantation records, documents related to the transatlantic slave trade, and greater access to sources from which archaeologists can identify whole artifacts from singular sherds and fragments has been a tremendous benefit,” Pecoraro says. “All of this leads to a more robust interpretation of how the American plantation functioned.”

A circa-1765 watercolor of Drayton Hall depicts the original house in its entirety. In addition to the main house—the only building still standing from the original complex—two colonnades once curved out towards two flanker buildings that enslaved people probably used for cooking, storage, living, or other purposes. Although these sites have been a source of study for archaeologists since the National Trust’s acquisition, only recently have they been reexamined in depth. Beginning last fall, the archaeology team returned to the north flanker building site to continue earlier excavations—the first from 1981 to 1982, and a second in 2008.

What’s particularly exciting for Pecoraro is how this work reflects changing trends in archaeology. From the early days of archaeology at Drayton Hall in the 1970s, research questions focused on the standards of living for both the Drayton family and the enslaved community, Pecoraro says.

Analysis of artifacts was largely pattern-based, he explains—meaning that it was plugged into a formulaic understanding of what items a Lowcountry plantation owner like John Drayton might have had, for example, versus a plantation owner living in South Carolina’s rural backcountry. These superficial assumptions didn’t allow for the great differences in how people of all classes lived. The same is true for how artifacts associated with the enslaved population were analyzed in the past. Identifying these materials was difficult then, and it still is now. What’s changed is that far more research has been conducted into the lives of enslaved people and others, along with an ongoing racial reckoning in the national discourse.

“The archaeological fieldwork undertaken between 1974 and the present has ebbed and flowed with trends in the field as a whole,” Pecoraro says. “We now see that the lines of pattern analysis, when it comes to artifact interpretation, are blurred. With the advances of social history woven into the archaeological narrative, there is much more agency given to those who lived on the property—the Native Americans, women, and the enslaved Black population—and interpretation of what we are finding is made that much more robust.”

Archaeology has helped to confirm that enslaved people at Drayton Hall and elsewhere were making pottery that evolved in style from both Native American and African or Afro-Caribbean traditions, Pecoraro says. Archaeological investigations can even determine the crops grown to feed both enslavers and enslaved, as seen through faunal remains, botanical analysis, and soil sampling. “All this is to say, the field of archaeology has diversified from 1974,” he says, “with differing research questions to be asked of the archaeological record combined with primary historical accounts.”

The north flanker is also valuable because it has yielded definitive evidence—buttons, gun flints, musket balls, and the like—of the site’s occupation during the American Revolution. It’s known that British troops occupied the property around 1780 before they crossed the Ashley River to lay siege to Charleston, and that American forces were there between the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 and the Treaty of Paris in 1783. But a detailed understanding of how Drayton Hall endured this period has so far proven elusive.

“Around Drayton Hall, this theater of operations after the fall of the city is very poorly known,” Pecoraro says. “The area suffers greatly, the rice landscape takes a while to recover, the countryside is plundered. It’s this strange period of stalemate that we hope to illuminate. Where is the enslaved population? Are they holed up at Drayton Hall or elsewhere? Or were they taken up by the British Army? Everyone is in flux.” With the nation poised to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence beginning in 2026, the time seems ripe for further examination.

In 2022, Drayton Hall partnered with land trusts and other historic sites to commission an aerial high-definition light detection and ranging (LiDAR) survey across a roughly 73-square-mile area in the Ashley River Historic District. That effort allowed Drayton Hall’s 2023 Wood Family Fellow, Hannah St. Onge, to create a digital elevation model that focused on about 200 acres of the Drayton Hall landscape. The model allows viewers to see historic landscape features that today are covered by woods, and that help point to the probable locations of structures like slave dwellings, field boundaries, and old tram lines. The model also allows for digital manipulations, such as the removal of trees in areas of the property that were not wooded in the 18th and 19th centuries. This further helps staff to visualize sight lines from the main house to what might have been slave barracks or other areas within the Draytons’ control. Whether these were actual slave dwellings will require further fieldwork and research.

Alongside the archaeology, one urgent preservation need at Drayton Hall is the Great Hall ceiling, which has slowly sustained damage and cracks because the floor above it flexes when it is walked on and lacks proper support. Already, elements of the cast-plaster decoration have failed, but repairs are not possible without also fixing the floor above. Smith and her team are working on a solution.

“We always have a list of preservation goals that we’re trying to move the needle on, but the ceiling project is the most pressing right now,” Smith says. Other upcoming projects include a structural roof assessment to determine the house’s resiliency during a hurricane or tornado, repointing exterior brick, and addressing a bulging exterior wall.