VCU archeological dig revealing clues to how Civil War soldiers, Native Americans lived

By Mike Frontiero
VCU School of Education

RICHMOND, Va. – At a place described as a living laboratory to study the environment, archeologists at Virginia Commonwealth University are discovering new clues about the lives of Civil War soldiers and Native Americans.

They’re finding bullet fragments, nails and other clues around Civil War earthworks on a 374-acre research tract along the James River in Virginia, known as the VCU Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences. These earthworks will hopefully reveal what the history books don’t say about life on the front lines.

It is here that 100,000 Union soldiers under the command of General George McClellan established Camp Lincoln in 1862 in a failed attempt to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital 20 miles to the west. “The front lines would have been in trenches,” said VCU archeologist Amber Bennett, Ph.D. “The soldiers would spend their days here in shifts overlooking the waterways.”

Hoping to bring a swift end to the Civil War, McClellan’s troops built several miles of earthworks to protect against Confederate soldiers in the area. “I don’t know what it was like to be a soldier living here, to spend 12 hours living in a wet, soggy pit,” said Bennett. “My students come out and spend eight to 10 hours in a wet soggy pit, but they can go home to a shower and real food. Those soldiers didn’t have that opportunity.”

Bennett and her students also are finding stone scrapers and projectile points, which suggests that Native Americans made hunting tools here. “If you can imagine a prehistoric hunter coming in and knowing he has to shoot so many arrows and notice ‘I have to make more projectile points so I have to reach in my tool bag, make more projectile points, and make my kill’,” said student Tony Bradley.

It’s hoped that the artifacts will reveal how people lived, fought, and died during these periods of American history.