Scientific American Frontiers on PBS

In this installment, host Alan Alda visits three Virginia historic sites where archaeologists are digging for clues to the country's past. First stop: Jamestown, where Alda surveys efforts to find out what caused “the starving time” of 1609-10. Then, in Williamsburg and Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, Alda looks at how slaves lived. Not well, understandably, but there's evidence of slave resilience and ingenuity, and of Jefferson's internal conflicts over slavery. He “designed his house for slavery,” Alda says. “And also to hide slavery.”