For at least two decades, historians had been searching for the site of the cabin in which Harriet Tubman lived with her family as a young adult.

“Land records told us it was here somewhere,” said Julie M. Schablitsky, the chief archaeologist at the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration, who led an excavation of the swampy terrain on Maryland’s Eastern Shore beginning last fall. “We couldn’t understand why we weren’t finding anything. It was like, ‘Where is this place?’”