Liberty Hall: an academy, a slave plantation, a tenant farm, and once again an academic landscape all within the ancestral homelands of the Monacan Indian Nation.

Located around the crown of Mulberry Hill, just outside of Lexington, Virginia, the archaeological site of Liberty Hall encompasses roughly 20 acres within the ancestral homelands and the Yesa People and their descendants, the Monacan Indian Nation whose stewardship of these lands began at least as far back as 900 AD.

First exavated beginning in 1974 by W&L Professor John McDaniel and his students, Liberty Hall has yielded up hundreds of thousands of artifacts and the remains of at least a dozen structures that acted as academic and farm buildings whose use and occupation span the period from 1782 until the present. To date, no significant remains of Native American presence have been uncovered at Liberty Hall, though its location seems ideally suited as a winter-camp for the late-woodland period Monacan People.

Our current work here takes up the mantle of Professor McDaniel, continuing excavations, artifact analysis, and archival research, all while digitizing and modernizing the curation of the materials associated with Liberty Hall.