This is one of a weekly series of articles titled "Secrets in the Dirt" appearing on Tuesdays in the Daily Press - Don't forget that a Throckmorton was among the original Jamestown Company. -------------------- A new understanding -------------------- Jamestown archaeologists gain insight into the first permanent English settlement BY MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON 757-247-4783 [email protected] October 4 2005 Bill Kelso stands on an embankment high above the earth, surveying an ancient landscape pockmarked by hundreds of centuries-old archaeological features. Postholes and trash pits dating from English America's earliest days dot much of what he sees, then disappear under a long line of brick hearths and cobblestone footings constructed just a few years later. Other evidence from the 1620s, 1640s and even the second half of the 1600s cuts across these earlier remains, resulting in a tangled hodgepodge of soil stains and architectural debris that spans one of the most fabled chapters in American history. But as confusing as this jumbled expanse of clay may seem to most people's eyes, it's full of revelations for Kelso and his Jamestown Rediscovery colleagues. They've labored for more than two years to decipher the secrets hidden in the dirt, and - as the 2005 season of fieldwork nears its end - the rich story they've pulled from the earth has only grown deeper and more vivid. Rough, burrowlike holes mark the primitive dwellings where many of the earliest settlers lived from 1607 to 1610, barely protected from the elements by lean-tos made of canvas. Two cobblestone rectangles preserve the footprint of the 21/2-story row houses that rose from the same spot at the end of this time, signaling not just a dramatic change in the struggling colony's landscape but also a crucial new commitment to its permanence. "We're not just looking for archaeological features here. We're not just looking for artifacts. We're really trying to communicate with the way that these people thought and lived," Kelso says. "What we've found is a whole new pattern of change that we hadn't thought of before. They changed their attitude toward the colony over time - and they really adapted to the reality they found in Virginia." Sponsored by APVA Preservation Virginia, which has protected this 22.5-acre site on Jamestown Island since 1893, Kelso and his team began searching for remains of the long-lost fort in 1994. They quickly unearthed so much evidence that - in just over two years - they could trace the south bulwark and waterfront wall of the historic English outpost, which most historians believed had washed into the James River nearly two centuries before. But not until they found the west palisade wall in late 2003 - and began investigating the deep deposit of archaeological features buried under the mounds of a Civil War earthwork - did the complex nature of the site become apparent. Where much of the southeastern part of the fort had been scraped down over time - leaving only the earliest remains intact - the west section of the bastion survived mostly untouched beneath the Confederate army's 10-foot-high ramparts. And as the archaeologists probed through its puzzlelike maze of features, they discovered a time capsule so fertile and broad that it not only preserved evidence of the settlement's first days but also its evolution over the years. In the beginning, James Fort was just that, Kelso says, - an isolated military outpost guarding England's fragile toehold on an often hostile frontier. Its armored inhabitants lived in mud-and-stud huts and canvas-covered holes in the ground, sending back tales of a life so harsh that modern historians often have been reluctant to believe it. "We thought they were exaggerating before we saw the evidence in the ground," Kelso says. "But - clearly - they were living on the edge. No wonder there were so many deaths." Grim evidence of those hardships has emerged from the clay not far from the colonists' dens. More than two dozen sets of skeletal remains have been found in grave shafts not much smaller than the holes that mark their primitive dwellings. But after the colony's near collapse during the Starving Time of 1609-10, the timely arrival of a relief expedition with supplies and reinforcements turned the fortunes of the settlement around. Literally "cleansing" James Fort of many of its original features, Sir Thomas Gates resurrected the teetering frontier outpost, transforming its landscape through the construction of two large permanent buildings that resembled London row houses. Measuring nearly 175 feet long in all, the structures spanned nearly the entire length of the fort's west wall, providing dwelling and office space for the governor and his officers. Combined with three large storehouses, whose remains have not yet been found, the new, more urban setting changed the tone of the settlers' letters, too, prompting several surviving reports that describe the growing "town" with approval. "We didn't know what to think about Ralph Hamor's description until we saw the evidence materializing in the ground," Kelso says, referring to one of the letters. "But there it is. You can see the foundations of the buildings he saw. And when he was writing in 1611, things at Jamestown looked pretty good." So much evidence of the governor's residence has survived that - after studying the remains of a large 1617 addition - staff archaeologist Danny Schmidt was able to determine the width and pattern of the building's floorboards. Senior staff archaeologist Jamie May had to revise her detailed maps of the excavation's progress for much the same reason. Confronted with a wealth of evidence, she now divides the archaeological features into two distinct periods where before there had been just one. "We've got too much going on in the fort period - and that's good. It's really exciting for us," May says. "Now we can divide up and partition out the different features over a longer period of time - and that's giving us a much fuller picture of what happened here." The artifact record has grown in size and complexity, too, enabling curator Bly Straube to detect numerous patterns in the life of the colonists as the settlement developed. Sifting through a horde of evidence that now includes nearly 1 million objects, she sees far more signs of women in the later contexts, which have given up such telltale clues of the female hand as milkpans and needlework scissors. Wealth and social status become more pronounced over time as well, as seen in the gradual emergence of such then-costly architectural features as window glass, door locks and decorative tiles. "We've always found high-status things. But in the earlier contexts you're always kind of surprised because they're associated with some pretty crude structures," she says. "As it gets later, the structures get more sophisticated - and the number of high-status artifacts grows - reflecting the move from James Fort to Jamestown." Other patterns have become apparent, too, particularly regarding the fort's unexpectedly strong roots in the pre-Enlightenment culture of the Elizabethan era. Though the colonists defended themselves with guns and gunpowder, they still wore swords, helmets and medieval-looking armor. They also used counting tokens known as jettons to make mathematical calculations because of their cumbersome reliance on Roman instead of Arabic numerals. As time passed, however, that old way of life changed quickly. And despite Jamestown's distance from the rest of the western world, the colonists here adopted new technological and cultural developments almost as soon as they appeared in Europe - then left tantalizing signs of those shifts in the artifacts they discarded. "Scientific things are just starting to happen. The telescope was invented in 1609 and showed up here not long afterwards," Straube says. "So it's a very interesting period in terms of the artifacts." With roughly half of the original fort remaining to be dug, many more discoveries are expected. Kelso and his team are particularly keen on exploring a deeply buried feature that was found under a 1617 hearth - and which could be one of the fort's first wells. Other secrets lie hidden in the huge cache of artifacts, which has grown so quickly over the past two years that Straube and her colleagues have not had much time to study many of the objects. "Jamestown is the black hole of America's history. It was the beginning, but up until now it was lost," she says. "That makes everything we can find out important." Copyright (c) 2005, Daily Press