Check out this article on "Archaeologists look for Filipino relics in Annapolis" which features graduate students, Kate Deeley and Kathrina Aben and their research led by Dr. Mark Leone. 

In a musty Annapolis basement in the heart of the Historic District, students spend hours gently scraping away at a dirt floor around bits and pieces of history: a bone button, a porcelain doll arm, a fish scale, a plate shard with a decorative print.

They hardly notice it’s grunt work — shoveling and lugging pails of rubble — because they find it so riveting.  “I kinda want to stay sometimes,” said Edward McLaughlin, an undergraduate anthropology student.

It’s the third and final summer a University of Maryland team is conducting an archaeological dig at the James Holliday home at 99 East St. Holliday was a middle-class freed slave and one of the first African Americans to work at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Holliday bought the house in 1850, a decade before the Civil War. It has been passed down from generation to generation; Dee Levister, a descendant, owns it today.

In the first year of the excavation, archaeologists began to uncover the relics of a 19th-century African-American family. They dug through a wooden barrel-lined privy in the backyard — a trash pit — to find food, ceramics, nails, glass, naval uniform buttons and other items from everyday life.  Read more...