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11 Love, Let, and Life An Archaeology of Tennis at the College of William and Mary Donald Sadler On a crisp fall day in 1941, she stepped out onto the clay. Bending down to make sure her laces were fixed tight, she gripped the newly taped handle of the racket, eager to test it against her opponent across the net. Her teammates applauded her with their usual verve, offering sharp female yells of encouragement . There were boys to root for her as well, though soon enough most of their cheers would be silenced, as unforeseen events led them to their life’s great calling. Plans were being hatched in the Pacific, and very soon America would lose its naive innocence, becoming forever changed. The war would alter her own life too, though she did not think of that now; she thought only of victory as her sneakers kicked up the dirt off the sun-baked red clay of the tennis court. The dust danced through the air, past the chain-link fence at her back and right, and out and on toward the dormitories and classroom buildings on the grounds of the College of William and Mary. Dorothea Kissam played tennis. She was the tallest of the twenty-three girls on the women’s team that year and also the only one with long, flowing blonde hair, helping her to stand out and be noticed. Sixty-two years later, she was. When breaking ground during archaeological work on the second oldest college in America, expectations are higher than revealing the fact that girls played tennis here. The College of William and Mary began in 1693 and followed only Harvard University as the country’s first seat of higher learning. Modern-day William and Mary is consistently ranked as one of America’s finest public small colleges, and the modest but growing student body is ripe with some of the brightest youth today’s preparatory schools can produce. The increasing number of incoming students requires that William and Mary adapt over time and expand upon its quaint colonial roots. Unfortu- Love, Let, and Life 209 nately for some, expansion meant the need for a new dormitory on the spot of one of the most popular green areas on campus, the Martha Barksdale Athletic Field. The field was named after the innovator of women’s athletics at the college, who taught and played over a dozen sports. Used for multiple activities for both genders, Barksdale Field was also a great spot to hang out, catch some sun, study for that demanding class, or just people watch. The oncoming dormitory was seen as an evil, and as archaeologists we were unfairly viewed as the harbingers of that field-threatening wickedness. Tools were tampered with, site markers taken up, test units refilled by environmental saboteurs—all in an effort to delay or prevent construction. One particular brand of protest saw slogans burned into the lawn, such as “Save Our Field” and “Go Home,” making for worrisome digging to say the least. The crew hoped that the uncomfortable environment would be offset by the discovery of wonderful things. The earlier Phase I survey (Monroe and Lewes, 2004) on Barksdale Field had revealed a scattering of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structural and domestic artifacts. Given the location of the project area along a historic road between Williamsburg and Jamestown, research questions were directed at the possibility of locating individual farmsteads of the middling sorts. Also, troops of various wars had marched across these fields and camped here or nearby, possibly leaving some trace of their passing. Students and common folk of varied lives had walked this ground within the colonial capital of Virginia since the late seventeenth century. Though earlier maps of the area revealed no structures throughout time, we hoped that the archaeological effort would produce some long-lost foundation or colonial household away from the bustle of the main streets of Williamsburg. Thirty-one test units and eight test trenches later, we found out that Dorothea Kissam played tennis. Expecting Thomas Jefferson’s lost pocket watch and instead getting net holders and concrete fence posts can be a little exasperating. Despite finding hundreds of scattered artifacts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the team began to come to grips with the fact that the only features discovered were associated with the twentieth-century campus. Once all these modern features were related with one another and mapped out, however, they began to correlate into an...

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