JAMESTOWN UNCOVERED .. by William M. Kelso for British Heritage Magazine Recent discoveries at Jamestown, Virginia, have uncovered some surprising insights into everyday life at England's first permanent colony in North America. On 14th May, 1607, just over 100 men and boys filed ashore from the small sailing ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, onto what English adventurers came to call Jamestown Island in Virginia. The decision to land on that site was no accident; the colonists had spent more than two and a half weeks searching for the ideal setting for their town. One eyewitness account explained that they chose Jamestown Island because the navigable river channel came so near to the shore that they could moor their ships to the trees. That certainly made unloading supplies easier, but the site had additional advantages. The settlers had very specific instructions from the Virginia Company in London, the merchants and nobles who put up the money for the venture. The Company officials had advised the colonists to settle at least 100 miles from the ocean as protection against the likelihood of Spanish reprisals for past English privateering raids and for muscling in on "Spain's" New World. If the colonists did settle closer to the ocean, however, the Virginia Company recommended that they at least choose a naturally defensive place such as "some Island." Jamestown Island was, in fact, only 30 miles from the open sea. To avoid warfare with the American natives the Englishmen were also supposed to choose an uninhabited site. Apart from Jamestown Island, few locations on the James River satisfied these conditions. There the first English settlement in the New World began. So goes the less negative version of the siting of James Fort at Jamestown Island. But more often, historians consider descriptions of the marshy, mosquito-infested, low-lying island lacking fresh water to be proof enough of how ignorant the colonists were when they decided to settle in such an unhealthy place. Even though Jamestown eventually proved to be the durable beginning of the English presence in America, most historians cannot emphasize enough the supposed incompetence of its leaders and their "drone-like" hundred-plus followers. Most give major recognition for what little success Jamestown achieved to the daredevil captain from Lincolnshire, John Smith, who left the most complete and only in depth published account of the venture's early months. But now the results of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities' Jamestown Rediscovery Archaeological Project are beginning to tell a fairer version of the story of England's first permanent North American colony. From the outset, the project's overall goal was to locate and uncover any remains of the first Jamestown settlement--especially traces of James Fort as it was originally constructed, but also evidence of any other phases it may have evolved into from 1607 to 1624. That was an extremely ambitious quest, because when the project began in 1994 many Jamestown visitors and scholars believed that all traces of the James Fort settlement had been the victim of James River shoreline erosion. Happily, the first three seasons of digging revealed that the remains of the early settlement had almost totally escaped erosion. By the end of the third summer season we had found enough of a pattern of an enclosure to be confident of the configuration of the fort's south-eastern corner. That footprint consisted of slot trenches, where upright side-by-side log palisades once stood, and a curved dry moat. Other signs included cellars inside the palisade lines, one near the south-east corner and another amid the curve of the fort's corner cannon emplacement, possibly a secondary powder magazine. Both these and the moat had been filled in with rich deposits of discarded armour, pottery, trade copper, waste from glass-making, and garbage bones from the earliest period of the settlement, 1607 to 1610. For the "remainder of the story" http://americanhistory.about.com/library/prm/bljamestown1.htm