SnakeMedicine_Book1

ON LOCATION
1 I M O N T I C E L L O , V I R G I N I A
At the beginning of the quest, while Angus was residing in Washington,
D.C., the very first photograph was taken at Monticello,
near Charlottesville, Virginia. This photo marks the beginning of the
journey. The picture is of a simple grave marker that sits under the
great trees surrounding Thomas Jefferson’s famous home. Only recently
discovered, the marker reveals the eternal resting place for the household’s
slaves.
As with many sacred earth sites, this
graveyard is unobtrusive and almost hidden.
It lies at the base of a heavily wooded,
steep hill crowned by the majestic Monticello
plantation. By comparison, the humble
graveyard, overlooked by most visitors,
is situated in a lightly cordoned area of the
Monticello visitor parking lot.
Before Scott Angus left on his crosscountry
trek, he intended to photograph
the site where the ever-prolific Jefferson
had written about his excavation of an Indian
mound. Indian mounds still abound
in much of Eastern U.S. No one really
knows why they were built. Their purpose(s)
remain a mystery to this day,
although many theories have been postulated.
Photographing these sites from the
ground so that they would be meaningful
was intriguing to Angus. Even in aerial
photographs they are difficult to discern.
Yet when we arrived at Monticello and
asked to be directed to the site, we encountered
bewilderment. Even the knowledgeable
people at the nearby Kenwood
Institute and the Robert H. Smith International
Center for Jefferson Studies said the
site had never been located. It is quite possible
that the site identification was locked
in a trunk of Jeffersonian papers that was
part of the cargo now lying at the bottom
of the ocean when the vessel carrying
them sank during a storm. 1 The date of excavation
is also in question, although there
is some agreement that Jefferson organized
his archeological expedition prior to
the Revolution but wrote about it in the
early 1780s.
Robert H. Smith
International Center
for Jefferson Studies.
(Charlottesville,
Virginia)
[Sopensky photo]
With the elusive Indian mound evading
us at Monticello, Scott and I concluded
that it was fitting that the end of one career—as
a commercial photographer in
Washington, D.C.—be documented by a
photograph of a sacred site, a graveyard.
In death there is life.
1 “The original manuscript delivered to Marbois in 1781 has never been found and may no longer exist, and it is known that Jefferson continued work on the 1781 manuscript.”
6
In “Jefferson's Excavation of an Indian Burial Mound,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia « Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello; http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/
jeffersons-excavation-indian-burial-mound [11/6/2016 3:23pm]