♪ ♪ Dr. JULIE SCHABLITSKY: So much of African American History is silent, because these people who were enslaved didn't have an outlet for their words, for their families.

And so sometimes the only time that we can really get into that history is through the things they left behind.

CATHERINE MORRISON: If I can do this one small thing, and open that conversation door just a little bit, then I feel like, I've had a purpose.

There was a reason why I ended up in this community, in this house, at this time.

(talking in background) HERSCHEL JOHNSON: When we would give tours, we would stop the bus.

And so I would let people look back and tell them there's the slave quarters in the rear of the house.

MORRISON: It had always been referred to as the slave cabin in oral history, coming from previous owners and people in the community.

JOHNSON: Alexander Bayly was a doctor.

There was an attorney.

I know that they were professional people.

MORRISON: Luckily for us, we are on the Harriet Tubman byway.

The Chesapeake Heritage Area, and Dorchester County stepped in to help us, and in that process, I met and, he came here to the house, a gentleman named Nick Redding.

And Nick knew that the State Highway Authority did archeological digs.

So Nick had suggested, why don't we see if we can get some archaeology done while it's undisturbed.

(scraping) DR. SCHABLITSKY: What we're trying to do here is solve a mystery of the age of not only the cabin, but when did people begin living here.

If we can get it before emancipation, 1864, we would know that Alexander Hamilton Bayly's enslaved families, and many women and children were living in this space.

(birds chirping) As archaeologists, what we want to do is try and control where exactly we're finding the artifacts.

So we control that by digging in square excavation units, they can fluctuate in size from a couple feet to five feet square.

And that allows us to take measurements both vertically and horizontally, to figure out how these artifacts were laid down over time.

Each layer of soil that we dig down, will have artifacts that date to a certain time period; bone, sometimes porcelain toys, nails, even broken dishes.

So those sorts of objects have specific dates that they were manufactured.

And it's up to us to determine when they entered the archaeological record.

(scraping) ARCHEOLOGIST: This is the first hint of it.

And it's a little hump of it.

And I assume it goes down.

So when I, whenever you get a sort of thing like this, you want to start working on the edges, DR. SCHABLITSKY: We have to think about not only what was inside the cabin, but what was there before the cabin was there.

So as we begin to dig down through the soils, we're beginning to try and pay attention to when we're in the cabin, and then before the cabin was there, and we're finding evidence of the Bayly family.

Once the building was put on that location, then additional soils and artifacts began to accumulate in that space.

And that's really what we're looking for.

So what we're trying to find out is how far back this cabin goes, if we know someone lived there or a family lived there, we need to figure out the age of those items.

So if I have a broken ceramic plate, or a teacup or an old bottle that was made and deposited before emancipation in 1864 that's going to begin to push the date of that cabin's occupation back into the past.

I think we're in the 1870's, 1860's but I have to wait 'til we get back into the lab and really look at the artifacts and the way those artifacts are laid across the cabin and also throughout the layers of time.

This is a bottle, a medicine bottle, and it's from a pharmaceutical company in Cambridge.

You can imagine Dr. Bayly going down and ordering these sorts of pharmaceutical patent medicines from the local druggist.

Here's a little bottle that we believe could have been a pill bottle, it's very small, made of glass, and the date is probably late 19th century.

A lot of times when people think of those who were impoverished or enslaved, a lot of times they think of them, you know, drinking or eating out of very rustic bowls and plates.

But that wasn't always the case, a lot of times, they did have tea sets, they had cups, and they had decorative dishes like this blue transfer print.

One of the most, exciting artifacts to come out of this is this doll head.

And it's probably from the mid-nineteenth century, maybe a little bit later, and was probably made in Germany and then shipped here and sold in the store.

We found it 150 years later.

After we finish excavating at the Bayly cabin, what we're doing is we're bringing all the artifacts back to Baltimore to be washed, processed and catalogued in our laboratory.

But we actually are also doing something kind of interesting and unique, and we've collected half a dozen smoking tobacco pipe stems.

And those pipe stems will be sent to a lab where we're going to try and extract human DNA from these pipe stems.

Even if the DNA is degraded, a lot of times you can come away with knowing if it was a man or woman who smoked the pipe, and sometimes even looking at their ancestry.

So, it may lead us all the way back to West Africa.

MORRISON: We're currently working on a way to provide educational access for people from a distance across the yard.

I can't imagine not sharing with as many people as we can, all that we've learned over the last year and a half, two years.

I had no idea how incredible this experience would be.

I was excited.

But they let me come in there and I dig every day off, I go out there and get right up in the dirt with them.

And they've taught me about everything that they're doing.

I'm... overwhelmed by the incredible interest and hard work and knowledge that they're willing to share and the things that it is bringing to this community.

If I can just make a small contribution, I'm very proud of that.

JOHNSON: If you talk about the history of America, you've got to talk about the history of both enslavement and people that enslaved people.

It's so important that we know this and you can't be ashamed if one of your ancestors was a slave.

You have to tell that history, and it's good that young people know it because we have to know where we came from.

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