One might think everything worth knowing about James Madison, primary author of the U.S. Constitution, the fourth president, and namesake for Wisconsin’s capital city, would have been unearthed by now. Not so, based on a recent visit to Montpelier, Madison’s plantation home in the Piedmont region of Virginia.
Technology is helping to rediscover authentic features of the home itself, but perhaps most significant is how ground-penetrating radar and LiDAR (light detection and ranging) is being used to better understand what took place on the grounds — especially as it involved enslaved and free white people who worked, lived, died, and were buried mostly anonymously there.
The same kind of detective work taking place in Montpelier is also happening a few miles down the road near Charlottesville, Virginia, at Monticello, home of Declaration of Independence author, third U.S. president, and tireless inventor Thomas Jefferson. Here, too, technology is providing new perspectives on buildings, grounds, artifacts, and people, enslaved or otherwise, who made it a working plantation in its time and a national landmark today.
These are just two examples of how technology — some new, some not so new — is allowing archaeologists and historians to tell fuller, more accurate stories about pivotal points in human development. Plus, there’s some big money behind it and some potential opportunities for enterprising young people who love both history and tech.
It’s not just happening in the backyards of founding fathers, as the evolving discovery of ancient dugout canoes in Madison’s Lake Mendota has demonstrated.
Maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen of the Wisconsin Historical Society discovered the first Native American canoe in 2021 somewhat accidentally while scuba diving off the lake’s southern shore. It was dated to 850 A.D. by “carbon dating,” the development of which won a Nobel Prize for University of Chicago professor Willard Libby in 1960 and remains an effective tool today.
A second canoe recovered in 2022 was dated to 1,100 B.C., nearly 2,000 years earlier. Use of ground-penetrating radar, LiDAR, and other techniques have identified and dated 11 other canoes in the same area — the oldest being about 4,500 years old.
Working with the Ho-Chunk Nation and the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa, the Historical Society and others continue to explore what lies beneath along an ancient shoreline that may have been a place where people stored their canoes. It has raised hopes that artifacts of a long-forgotten, flooded village could also be found at the bottom of the lake.
“Technologies such as ground-penetrating radar and LiDAR have allowed us to continue our work as historians,” said Christian Overland, chief executive officer of the Wisconsin Historical Society. “Our work with the tribal nations continues as we search for fragments of a now-submerged ancient village in the bottom of Lake Mendota that was inhabited by the ancestors of Tribes and provides evidence that ‘Teejop’ — today’s Madison — has been continually inhabited by humans for thousands of years.”
Overland added that other technologies, including Global Positioning System (GPS), are among tools used by historians, geologists, and archaeologists. For most of us, GPS is a convenient way to drive from Point A to Point B if we don’t already know the roads, but for people charting the stories of time it’s a tool to research historic events such as earthquakes and volcanoes.
Recent modeling of the ruins of Pompeii in Italy, destroyed by a volcanic eruption nearly 2,000 years ago, is one example. Also employed in Pompeii are technologies such as robotics, 3D scanning, machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence through a project called “The RePAIR,” which is short for “Reconstructing the Past: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics meet Cultural Heritage.”
“Tech is being used by historians to document battlefields, factories, towns, and places that started the American Revolution for democracy, the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution, and now the information age revolution for our next generations to learn from and use as inspiration to build a better future,” Overland said.
History isn’t stagnant, nor can it be erased, but tech is helping to refresh older stories and build new narratives — and perhaps some new careers.
