FOR SEVERAL hours, my pit-mate and I have removed a layer of gravel from our excavation plot, enough to make a mountain under the screens where we sifted out only a few nails and shards of glass.

But now, as we get to the older soil, the excavation work has gotten more serious in this 5-by-5 plot at the back door of the Gilmore Cabin, an original structure on the grounds of President James Madison's Montpelier in Orange County.

Noting the change, 20-year-old Kaylan Hubbard, an intern who'll be a junior at Hamilton College in New York this fall, painstakingly picked at some decayed paper with the tip of her trowel.

I tried to be just as careful. But hunkered down as I was--knees on a cushioned pad, hands either digging or bracing myself in the dirt--there wasn't much delicate left in arms that had carried gravel buckets all morning.

Seeing me slice away soil like a bulldozer instead of a surgeon, the demure but determined intern politely intervened.

"I've found you can get a lot more control on the trowel by putting your finger here in the middle," she said sweetly, demonstrating. "It keeps it from hopping around, cutting in too deeply."

Thanking her for the tip, I changed my grip and tried to preserve brownish clay feature in my end of the pit.

"We need to label all of this, take depth readings and sketch out the features," said Kaylan, pulling out a form to do just that.

That report and many, many more from nearly a dozen other plots at the site this summer will someday soon tell the story of the man who built it, George Gilmore Jr.

Matthew Reeves, Montpelier's chief archaeologist, said historical documents and oral histories say that Gilmore was a slave of James Madison's at Montpelier.

Not long after he was freed, Gilmore built the cabin and moved what became a family of eight there.

"We're hoping to use this site and information from the archaeology here to tell the story of what life was like for a recently freed slave," said Reeves.