1 “Two Tracts of Land at the Poplar Forest” A Historical and Archaeological Overview of Tomas Jeferson’s Plantation Retreat Barbara J. Heath and Jack Gary Introducing Poplar Forest or any site that has been inhabited for generations is a challenging task. How do we defne a place whose physical size, population, landscape, and use have changed dramatically over time? Te authors in this book ofer varied responses, focusing on written and archaeological evidence of former residents’ relationships to the environment, using analysis of buildings and landscape modifcations, and using analysis of acts of consumption and the display and use of consumer goods. Together, these studies provide insights into the specifc culture of one plantation and the broader culture of which it was a part during the century that stretched from the eve of the American Revolution to the Civil War. Today Poplar Forest is a National Historic Landmark, owned and adminis- tered since 1984 by the Corporation for Jeferson’s Poplar Forest, a nonproft pri- vate preservation organization. Dedicated to preserving, restoring, researching, and interpreting the period from 1806 to 1823, when Tomas Jeferson owned the property and used it as a private retreat and proftable plantation, the ad- ministrators of this site attribute its signifcance to its association with this im- portant fgure in American history. However, Jeferson’s postretirement use of Poplar Forest is just one part of a multifaceted story that spans thousands of years. While we focus on the property’s historic plantation past in this volume, archaeology has demonstrated that native people used this landscape as early as the Paleo-Indian period and as recently as the Late Woodland (Adams 2008). In the twentieth century, families lived and worked at Poplar Forest into the early 1980s. proof