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Article: Detecting the Phantoms of Gardens of the Past
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- February 22, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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Like most other branches of knowledge, archaeology has
advanced greatly in this century with the advent of new technology.
Armed with these scholarly tools and with the emergence of
landscape history and restoration as related fields, archaeologists
today have developed garden archaeology as its own specialty. Now,
the scientists not only look for foundations of long-vanished
outbuildings or traces of paths, as they did in the 1930s, but they
can detect the ghosts of planted beds and even the types of plants
that grew in them hundreds of years ago.
When Arthur Shurcliff, the first landscape architect at
Colonial Williamsburg, began his research in the 1920s, the main
archaeological ...