Historic Charleston Foundation
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Historic Charleston Foundation has long been an advocate for archaeology in Charleston.   HCF has sponsored archaeological investigations at our museum houses, the Nathaniel Russell House and the Aiken Rhett House, as well as properties that we have owned or leased like McLeod Plantation and the Old Powder Magazine.  In addition, the Foundation has worked closely with The Charleston Museum, the City of Charleston, Charleston County and others on a number of digs across the historic peninsula.  In the past several years the Foundation has been a leading force on the Mayor’s Walled City Task Force, created in 2005 to learn more about the only English walled city in North America through research and archaeological excavations.  The excavations in 2008 and 2009 sucessfully located and provided valuable information on Charleston’s early fortifications and colonial life. 

In the summer of 2011, the Foundation, through a generous gift from Mead Westvaco, collaborated with the College of Charleston and The Charleston Museum on a two- week long excavation of the Lord Ashley site.  This important early colonial frontier settlement in now within Dorchester County along the upper banks of the Ashley River. This was the site of a plantation and Native American trading outpost owned by Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury. It was occupied 1675-1685 and has one of the earliest known brick foundations attributed to the English in South Carolina.

All of these archaeological digs help to answer questions about Charleston’s history that the documentary record alone cannot provide.   Unlike history, which relies primarily upon written records and documents to interpret the lives of the elite and literate, archaeology makes it possible to explore the lives of everyday people through analysis of the things they made and left behind.  

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of organizations like the Foundation and The Charleston Museum, archaeological sites in Charleston are routinely destroyed.  Although it has been a goal of non-profits and city planners for many years, there is as yet, no archaeological ordinance to protect the city’s buried resources.   Every day the city’s citizens and tourists walk over hundreds of years of Charleston’s historical record, and without a municipal ordinance in place to protect archaeological artifacts from future destruction, that record is in danger of being lost forever.