An Archaeology of Bacon's Rebellion at 350: The View from Bacon's Castle
Friday, October 23, 2026 | 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Washington Hall, Room 201
Anthropology Homecoming Lecture:
An Archaeology of Bacon's Rebellion at 350: The View from "Bacon's Castle (1676-2026)
Rebekah Planto, PhD (’26)
A century before the American Revolution, Bacon’s Rebellion erupted when Nathaniel Bacon, Jr. and his supporters launched a campaign of violence against the region’s Indigenous tribes in defiance of the royal governor, Sir William Berkeley. The motives of Bacon and his fellow elite insurrectionists were entirely self-interested, but they garnered broad support by stoking anti-Native prejudice and exploiting the desperation of the colony’s unfree and economically marginalized majority. After marching on and destroying Jamestown in September 1676, Bacon resumed his single-minded campaign against Native people until his death a few weeks later. Meanwhile, his followers took the opportunity to exercise political and personal grievances closer to home, raiding plantations of prominent Loyalists. One of their targets was Arthur Allen, who had recently inherited his father’s large Surry County plantation. Allen’s opposition to Bacon placed him in the minority even among elites in the rural county south of the James River. After the burning of Jamestown, he retreated with other Berkeley allies to the Eastern Shore while his new, well-provisioned brick house was seized and garrisoned by local Baconites who used it as a fort for the remainder of the conflict.
Today, “Allen’s brick house” (a.k.a., “Bacon’s Castle”) is Virginia’s oldest standing house and the only surviving structure involved in Bacon’s Rebellion. Excavations in the 1980s revealed that after the 1676 siege, damage was hastily buried in a shallow pit as bound laborers completed the elaborate garden complex. Attempts to conceal these traces thus ensured their preservation within the very fabric of the (post)colonial landscape for over 300 years. Despite the extraordinary circumstances surrounding their formation, the deposits consist of ordinary domestic artifacts, affording glimpses into the materiality of everyday life and labor during a period for which the artifactual record is otherwise ephemeral. Contextual analysis of archaeological and documentary evidence provides vital insights into this consequential period and its all-too-relevant legacies, and sheds new light on the lives of residents and others connected with the site during this time.