Digging it BY MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON 247-4783 November 16, 2004 When the last bell rings at the end of the day, an impatient John Kravitz always puts on a burst of speed and sprints for the door. But these days the 17-year-old Kecoughtan High School student has a lot more on his mind after getting out of class than powering up his Xbox for a video game or busting a trick on his skateboard. Hopping in the car with his mom or dad, Kravitz rides to a corner near the old downtown Hampton waterfront, where he quickly says goodbye, jumps out and steps through a gap in a chainlink fence surrounding a hole-filled lot. There he picks up a heavy bucket of dirt, empties it into a screen-bottomed cradle laid across a wheelbarrow and begins his daily after-school grind of sifting meticulously through the soil. Bucket after bucket follows the first, interrupted only when the wheelbarrow fills and has to be pushed up and emptied at the top of an increasingly tall pile of spoils. But Kravitz doesn't seem to mind the monotony of his task, the physical demands it requires or the constant need to stay alert for signs of secrets lurking in the dirt. Just the other day he found an 18th-century military coat button, adding to a long list of artifacts that includes pipe bowls, animal bones, wine bottle fragments and pieces of pottery. And he knows that the only way to repeat the excitement of those discoveries is to keep sifting and paying attention. "Usually, I just hang around at home and play guitar and stuff - or I'll go outside and skateboard," says Kravitz, who now spends every weekday afternoon working as a volunteer at the downtown Hampton archaeological project. "But since the first day I came down here, I'd rather be doing this. The only thing that could keep me from coming here is two broken arms." Kravitz started working at the site nearly two months ago - after his mom and dad stopped by the dig on a walk through downtown Hampton. Ron Kravitz is an engineer. He's always had a strong interest in history. But Debbie Kravitz, who works as a preschool teacher at nearby First United Methodist Church, quickly saw something else as project archaeologist Hank Lutton talked to them about the excavation. "The whole time it kept going through my head - John would really love this!'" she says. "I've never been one to be bashful. So I just piped up and asked if they took volunteers." John's mom had good reason to believe that her son would jump at the chance to take a hands-on role in the excavation. When the boy was 2 years old, she says, she found him out in the backyard digging holes in the ground. He was imitating the archaeologists and paleontologists he had seen while watching the Discovery Channel with his dad. She also had heartfelt reasons for hoping that her son would experience the same kind of enthusiasm that had captured his imagination until he was about 5. Though John's intelligence test scores had always been high, his indifferent record at school showed the classic signs of an easily bored underachiever. He also struggled with a wavering concentration problem that was eventually diagnosed as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. "He's a bright boy - a good boy. Except for his grades, I couldn't ask for a better son," Debbie says. "But we just didn't know what direction to point him in - and we've been praying for something like this to come along." Despite his mother's hope, the opportunity to work at the downtown dig could have been just as disappointing as almost every previous attempt to spark John's interest and imagination. Several other young people had already tried their hand at sifting for artifacts, Lutton says. And all but a few had quickly discovered that the work required a kind of attention that they weren't willing to give. "Screening for artifacts is like learning to walk. It's the baby steps of archaeology - and there are many days when it can be predictable and mundane," says Lutton, who supervises the dig for the James River Institute for Archaeology. "So if you're easily distracted or don't like working with details, it can probably be pretty mind-numbing. We deal with a lot of tiny pieces of information that have to be put together into something larger - and it's not for everyone." Nevertheless, the dig had another important characteristic that promised to connect with John's past interests. An avid baseball player, the teen had always enjoyed being part of a game in which long moments of waiting can be followed by intense bursts of excitement. And that's exactly the kind of experience that attracts many of the people who become archaeologists, Lutton says. "Archaeology is a lot like baseball. It's monotonous and repetitive most of the time - with lots of swings and misses," he explains. "But once you learn to play by the rules, there are times when you can see the tension building. And that's when things can start to happen very rapidly." Johns' first day of screening produced just such a reward in the form of an 18th-century tobacco pipe bowl. His second and third days included similar kinds of finds, beginning a long list of trophies that now includes ceramics, metal, animal bones, oyster shells and glass dating from mid-1600s to Civil War. Even on days when nothing exciting emerges from the dirt, however, Kravitz goes home feeling like he's done something important. And he returns each weekday afternoon - and early in the morning on his days off from school - to make sure he doesn't miss the chance to do more. In addition to the job of picking up buckets and screening, he's learned to sort and package the artifacts according to their location on the site and the layer of ground from which they were recovered. He also keeps them organized by type of material and the care they require, making sure, for example, that he bags fragile objects separately from the site's constant crop of heavy oyster shells. He pitches in at the end of the day, too, providing a lot of extra muscle with his 6-foot-3, 190-pound frame as the archaeologists struggle to lay down the heavy waterproof fabric and sandbags used to cover and protect the dig. "He always helps us clean up in the evening - when all the rest of us are pretty tired from working all day," Lutton says. "He must think we're pretty old." Kravitz hates for each day to end - and not just because of the thrill he feels whenever he rescues an artifact from the dirt. Very quickly, he learned to recognize the potential importance of such small, seemingly insignificant objects in piecing together the bigger picture of Hampton's past, he says - and in the process he's learned to slow down and focus his previously unpredictable powers of concentration. "It's not just stuff we're digging up. It's pieces of history," he says. "And it's awesome to find something that no one knew was under the ground and be able to hold it in your hands." Similar changes seem to be taking place at school, where Kravitz's grades have improved noticeably over the past two months. The report card he brought home last week showed unexpected and welcome progress in every class, his mother says - and it was the best that she and her husband had seen for years. "It's been all good since John started working at the dig. Something has clicked," Debbie says. "We've always known he was a great kid. But I don't think he's ever had this kind of self- confidence. We hope it's the break that we've been waiting for." ========================================================= HAMPTON ROADS, VA. December 2, 2004 Bone yields clues to Colonial surgery -More details emerge about the 400-year-old skull fragment discovered in Jamestown this summer. BY MIKE HOLTZCLAW [email protected] The first known surgical patient in America was a European male. They'll never know his exact identity, but forensic analysts have revealed some demographic details of a skull fragment discovered in a Jamestown excavation this summer. The 400-year-old section of human skull was considered to be the earliest known evidence of surgery and autopsy in 17th-century America. Douglas Owsley, a forensic osteologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and Ashley McKeown, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Montana, determined the bone belonged to a male of European descent. "They could tell it was a male based on the robustness of the bone, and European because of the heavy lead content that was detected in the bone," Jamestown Rediscovery curator Bly Straube said Wednesday. "The lead was more reflective of a European - drinking out of a pewter vessel, eating off of a pewter plate - than of an Indian who wouldn't have had any access to lead." The skull fragment, approximately 4 by 5 inches, was found in an archeological dig in June. It was uncovered from a moat outside the Jamestown fort and was dated to approximately 1610, three years after John Smith and 104 other colonists established the settlement. Markings on the bone - circular cuts and saw marks - suggest an attempt to relieve pressure from a severe head wound, and later, an attempt at autopsy. In a news release, Jamestown curators identified a medical tool that had been unearthed more than a year earlier as a portion of a terrabellum, used to extract bullets. Straube said she recognized the instrument while looking at a plate showing tools devised by London surgeon John Woodall in the 17th century. The terrabellum - along with previously identified tools such as a Spatula mundani, used to treat severe constipation, and pieces of apothecary jars used to contain medicines and herbs - provide further details about the state of surgery and medical treatment among the early settlers. "The person who performed the procedure did not appear to be terribly adept at it," Straube said. "The surgeons at that time were not academically trained; they learned the craft through apprenticeships. The surgeons who went to sea were working without much supervision, and it seems as though some of the surgeons who came here were apprentices of John Woodall. What we've found here represents that whole learning curve. "That's what's so interesting about all of this: The question of 'What can you learn?' "