Secrets revealed BY MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON 247-4783 October 3 2004 Archaeologists faced a giant obstacle this past spring when they began their annual dig in search of historic Jamestown. After nine years of increasingly focused excavations, they'd finally located the elusive west wall of the triangular fort - and they knew which direction to go in their hunt for the colony's center. But between them and the heart of America's first permanent English settlement, an immense Civil War earthwork rose as much as 10 feet above the ground. Six months later, the archaeologists of the Jamestown Rediscovery project - led by director Bill Kelso - have removed and sifted through thousands of cubic feet of soil. They've recovered some 20,000 artifacts as they've labored, filling nearly 50 storage boxes with well-stuffed, carefully labeled bags of relics from the time of Capt. John Smith and Pocahontas. Equally impressive, however, are the secrets they've coaxed from the stones and stains in the dirt - including the footprint of a building so large and well-built that it has completely dashed previous theories about how the inside of the fort looked. "What's beneath those earthworks is clearly going to be the best-preserved part of James Fort - and it's the heart of the fort," says senior staff archaeologist Eric Deetz, who has supervised much of the fieldwork this summer. We can now say that the surface we're standing on today is the same surface the settlers were standing on circa 1610. Nowhere else in the fort have we been able to say that. And the stuff that's been coming up with the earthwork fill has been so fantastic that no one ever complains about the work it takes to remove it." Constructed in April 1861 as the waterfront anchor of a defensive line, the Confederate earthwork - known as Fort Pocahontas - never saw action during the Civil War. Manned for barely a year, its primary claim to fame came from its use as a testing ground for the armor that sheathed the sides of the ironclad CSS Virginia. Despite meticulous attention from the archaeologists, less than a handful of artifacts have emerged from this short period of occupation - not including the rugged iron spikes used to nail together the timbers of a gun platform. Yet not long after removing a layer of fill used to dress up the earthwork during the early 1900s, Kelso and Deetz realized that the Civil War laborers had constructed the stronghold with artifact-laden dirt from the time of William Shakespeare. So rich was the soil with early 17th-century artifacts that a test square measuring 10-by-10-feet in size took nearly six weeks to explore. And though the original archaeological context of those artifacts had been destroyed - reducing some of their value as evidence - their intimate connection to the first years of the English settlement continued to make them important. "There are areas to the east of the Confederate earthwork where we have found absolutely nothing - where the ground was scraped clean - and we couldn't figure out where it had all gone," Deetz says. "Now we know." Defying common practice, the archaeologists elected to screen all the displaced soil for artifacts rather than restricting their investigation to targeted samples. That decision meant countless hours of extra work as they removed and carefully sifted through the huge mounds of sandy clay. It also added to the dizzying stream of artifacts coming from the fort's west bulwark trench, where the dig had turned up an unusually large and fertile trash deposit dating to the settlement's earliest years. With the arrival of some 20 students for the project's summer field school, the volume grew even more, prompting the archaeologists to design and build an extra-capacity, electrically powered screener. "We had to have it. There was just too much material to go through," Kelso says. "But we were rewarded with a prize every week - and sometimes every day. So all the trouble has been worth it." Curator Bly Straube and conservators Michael Lavin and Dan Gamble had to shift their attention, too, in order to handle the volume of artifacts coming in from the field. Though most of the objects were stored for treatment and study at a later date, many were so provocative or curious that they required immediate attention - forcing Lavin and Gamble, in particular, to juggle their work on 750 other artifacts being conserved for a new $5 million, 7,500-square-foot exhibit. "Some of what we're finding is unique. We're seeing marvelous things that we haven't seen before - things that can really tell us a story," Straube says. "But because they're not all coming from a tightly dateable context, we're having to date them by art historical research and other methods instead. And it can take a lot of time to search through those sources." Among the most compelling discoveries pulled from the earthwork fill is a group of religious artifacts that includes a scratch-carved jet crucifix, a medallion bearing the likeness of St. Hyacinth and a wax seal decorated with the scallop shell of St. James of Compostela. Such potent emblems of Catholic faith would have been highly unusual at a time when England and Spain were bitter enemies - and Anglican Protestantism was the official and often strictly enforced religious belief at Jamestown. "I don't know that the answer to this Catholic material is simple. It has a very Spanish feel to it - similar to that found in the Spanish Armada shipwrecks but different from that found at St. Mary's City in Maryland and the Spanish colonial sites in Florida," Straube says. "But we're also finding it in trash deposits instead of in association with religious sites. So it could indicate the presence of Catholics here - or it could represent Catholic material that was being recycled for use by the English as trade items." Beneath the disturbed fill, the archaeologists found another prize - this one far larger and more provocative than anyone suspected. Uncovered first in the form of a few loosely aligned cobblestones, the footprint of Structure 172 - as the feature was cataloged - expanded enormously over time, changing from what looked like a short section of wall into a 167-foot-long, 18-foot-wide building. Running parallel to the fort's west wall, the rowhouselike structure broke down into a series of adjacent rooms as it grew - and soon became the season's primary focus because of its size and historical potential. Numerous double-sided hearths emerged from the soil, too, adding to the building's complexity and importance. Dating as early as 1610, the structure could be part of a massive rebuilding effort that took place that summer - and which included "two faire rowes of houses, all of framed Timber, two stories, and an upper Garret, or Corne loft high...," an eyewitness wrote. "Our goal this year was to come up with some idea of the town plan - to find out what was inside the triangle - and what we found was a huge building on the scale of what was being built as permanent structures in England," Kelso says. "It tells you that the settlement at Jamestown was a serious business. It wasn't just a temporary campsite or trading post - and that's changed the whole picture of what it looked like inside the fort." Much more information could be waiting as the archaeologists sift through the remaining layer of disturbed plowzone above the building's floor and search for the early 17th-century level. There, the surviving artifacts could reveal some of the historic settlement's earliest and most compelling secrets. "As big as it is, it's clear that a good number of the people at Jamestown lived in this structure. So it's very important," Deetz says. "Once it's all uncovered, we'll go in and excavate - sometimes as little as 2 inches - and look for the occupation layer. That will tell us what went on inside - and if it differed from one end of the building to the other." Copyright © 2004, Daily Press