Dr. J. Brent Morris Lends his Expertise to the Great Dismal Swamp Archeological Dig

Relying on centuries-old documents, Dr. Dan Sayers, an anthropologist at American University in Washington, D.C., has been conducting archeological digs in the Great Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina line. He is probing stories that “the Dismal” harbored settlements of escaped runaways from the early 1600s to the Civil War. J. Brent Morris, Ph.D., chair of the Humanities department and Associate Professor of History at USCB, is supporting Dr. Sayers’s effort by lending his expertise to document Dr. Sayers’s findings. “It was even more complicated than a needle in a haystack because these folks made it their goal to stay hidden,” Dr. Morris says.

‘Paradise of serpents’” How runaway slaves lived in the Great Dismal Swamp before escaping to Canada