OSSABAW ISLAND, Ga. (AP) – Sifting through dirt from the floor of a small cabin made from oyster shells and sand, archaeologist Dan Elliott is finding unexpected treasures.

He unearthed a doll-sized porcelain plate, clay marbles, lead shot and a French-made gunflint – fascinating finds from a cabin that once housed plantation slaves.

“We’re dealing with the facts. These are all things they left behind,” says Elliott, noting that toys and firearms’ material “could suggest their masters were letting them have a little bit of latitude.”

Researchers say three cabins made of tabby – a cement mixture of oyster shells, lime and sand – on this undeveloped, state-owned barrier island are among the best-preserved slave quarters in the South.

Now, 142 years after slavery ended, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the nonprofit Ossabaw Island Foundation are conducting the first archaeological digs here, hoping artifacts buried beneath the cabins will yield a better picture of how Southern slaves lived in the 18th and 19th centuries.

“It is easily one of the most important African-American slave sites in the Southeast,” said Dave Crass, Georgia’s state archaeologist. “Normally it’s a big, white-columned plantation house that’s still there. And the people who made the place work, their houses are long gone.”

Since most records on slaves were kept by their owners, “You’re seeing their world through white eyes,” Crass said. “You need archaeology to put a face on these very abstract ideas about what slave life was like.”

Ossabaw Island remains one of coastal Georgia’s wildest places. Hogs, deer, armadillos and Sicilian donkeys roam the island’s 11,800 acres of wishbone-shaped uplands among towering live oaks and Indian burial mounds. Roads crisscrossing the island are all dirt. There is no bridge to the mainland.

The first slaves arrived in the 1760s, when Jim Morel bought the island and established North End plantation to harvest live oaks for shipbuilding timber and to grow indigo and other cash crops.

Researchers believe Morel had about 100 slaves. More came later to work three additional plantations his sons established on the island, which is about 6 miles from Savannah.

The island had no clay suitable for making bricks, and they were expensive to ship, so slaves constructed their homes using oyster shells plentifully piled in trash heaps left by Indians.

Elliott, the lead archaeologist for a $1.3 million study, has located buried tabby foundations indicating 18 slave cabins once stood at North End. Only three survived intact, built 32-by-16 feet and divided into two living quarters sharing a chimney and hearth in the center wall.

Architectural conservator George Fore, hired to assess the cabins’ condition and origins, found that the original wooden ceiling boards had marks from a circular saw, indicating the cabins were likely built after 1840 when the first steam-powered saws became available.

Original window sashes in one cabin suggest it had glass windows, another unusual touch for a slave house.

“We don’t have that many plantation slave quarters that are fully intact like that,” Fore said. “All three of these have their internal plaster intact. Nails are in the walls where they obviously hung various things, clothes to dry. It gives you a personal touch with that time.”

Elliott has unearthed even more personal relics, many dating to the 18th century – a sign slaves may have built their tabby quarters on top of older housing. The finds include a small lice comb of carved bone and shards of an Indian pottery called Colono-ware – rare in Georgia. Bones from fish, birds, pigs and alligators hint at what slaves may have eaten.

Ironically, the three slave cabins survived not because they were left alone, but because they continued to be used as living quarters until the 1990s by staff of the state and the island’s last private owners.

A big part of Fore’s job was to oversee the demolition of modern kitchens, bathrooms, wood paneling and other additions tacked onto the cabins from 1915 to the 1970s.

The study is funded by a $400,000 National Park Service Grant, matching funds from the charitable foundation of late Coca-Cola President Robert Woodruff and private donations. Donors include actress Sandra Bullock, who owns a home on nearby Tybee Island.