Archaeologists unearth America's 'lost' history

Archaeologists unearth America's 'lost' history
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Michael Lavin raises his hand and shows me a single tobacco seed swirling in a small vial of water. This tiny brown speck he tells me, is a 400-year-old national treasure, one that is helping archaeologists uncover the story of the birth of America.

Lavin is a conservator with the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, which is unearthing the remains of England's first successful colony in the New World. In the past few years, he says, the dig has uncovered more than 1 million artefacts, and each day a few more emerge. As America nears the 400th anniversary of the first settlers disembarking at the site of Jamestown, the archaeological findings are subtly reshaping the story of America's beginnings.

On 13 May 1607, 104 colonists seeking their fortune and a better life disembarked from three ships and stepped ashore onto a spot that would become ground zero in a cultural and ecological exchange that was to transform a continent. It was a shaky start - two weeks later they were attacked by a war party of the Paspahegh tribe and suffered their first casualties. The incident awoke the settlers to the dire need for better defences, and in response they hastily constructed a triangular palisade with bulwarks at each corner, a building they named James Fort.

That fort was discovered just 13 years ago. "Throughout the 20th century most scholars thought that James Fort had been lost to erosion," says senior archaeologist Danny Schmidt. "They assumed there was no need to even look for it." That was until another archaeologist Bill Kelso, following a hunch, initiated a modern search for the building.

In his first season, Kelso discovered the remains of the fort's south wall in Jamestown, and his team has now located all three sides of the triangle and excavated the foundations of several buildings within the perimeter. Luckily, just 15 per cent of the fort has been eroded away by the adjacent river, and archaeologists are uncovering artefacts such as the tobacco seed and skeletons of the early inhabitants (see "Death in the new world"). "It's an incredibly rich site," says senior curator Bly Straub. "Little by little the fort has revealed itself."

During my visit, Schmidt led me to an open pit in the north corner of the triangle, farthest from the shore, where last summer the team discovered the remains of a buried well. "This has been a wonderful find for us," says Schmidt. "We think it's one of James Fort's earliest." Part of the foundation of a building dated to 1617 sits on top of the well, confirming it was dug earlier.

In recent months archaeologists have excavated to the bottom. On the way down, says Schmidt, "we encountered multiple trash layers - predominantly the remains of what the colonists were eating". These table scraps offer a snapshot of survival on the edge, and show how the colonists learned to sustain themselves on food sources such as oysters, turtles and fish - although historical accounts relate that many starved before the colony had a stable food supply.

“Table scraps offer a snapshot of life on the edge, and show how the colonists survived on oysters, turtles and fish”Apart from helping to flesh out the story of America's beginnings, the food remains have also proved to be an exciting new resource for scientists hoping to characterise the ongoing environmental impact of human habitation and industry around Chesapeake Bay.

Juliana Harding, a marine biologist at the nearby Virginia Institute of Marine Science is working on a study comparing oyster shells from the James Fort era with those of modern populations. The differences are striking. Oysters today are smaller and have shorter lifespans because of environmental degradation and over-harvesting. Because the shells in the well can be dated to within 10 years, it is possible to relate growth patterns and isotopic ratios in the shells to corresponding patterns in tree rings on land. This can link the climate record as captured in trees directly to corresponding water temperature and salinity patterns extracted from the shells, potentially providing a baseline that will allow Harding and others to measure the effects of climate change on the region.

"In eating and discarding the oysters, the colonists collected all of these little environmental data recorders and then essentially put them in a time capsule for us to find four hundred years later," says Harding. Similar studies are planned for insect parts that have been collected at the well, along with botanical remains.

Collectively, these studies should provide a portrait of the earliest moments in the so-called "Columbian exchange", when European plant and animal species began to change the landscape. It is for this reason that the tobacco seed, identified at the bottom of the well by archaeobotanist Steve Archer, is so important.

Lavin and his colleagues would like to know if the seed is the native North American species Nicotiana rustica or a southern variety, Nicotiana tabacum, which English colonist John Rolfe is thought to have imported from the West Indies around 1611 and cultivated for its superior flavour. In doing so, Rolfe, better known for marrying the Native American princess Pocahontas, ensured that tobacco became the nascent colony's first economically viable export, safeguarding its future and that of the entire American enterprise. The problem, says Lavin, is that DNA testing may destroy the seed, which is their only well-preserved specimen.

Meanwhile, Schmidt and his colleagues have begun to excavate what appears to be another well. It may be the colony's first, which records suggest was ordered by John Smith - the dominant figure in the history of Jamestown - sometime between 1608 and 1609. The excavation is still metres from the bottom. Schmidt shows me a partial deer skull emerging from the clay. It will shortly be catalogued along with the ever-growing collection that is filling up the project's vault.

"All this data that we thought were gone forever are now coming to light," says Straub. And the story is subtly different story to the one Americans grew up with. Popular accounts tend to take a derogatory view of the Jamestown colony, portraying the colonists as ill-prepared opportunists only interested in finding New World gold and too lazy to save themselves from starvation and disease. The artefacts suggest a different picture, in which adaptation under extreme pressure eventually produced a thriving population and the seeds of a new nation. "This is our birthplace as Americans," says Straub. "This is where we started."

From issue 2603 of New Scientist magazine, 11 May 2007, page 6-7
Death in the new world
Most of the first colonists to arrive in Jamestown did not survive their first year in the New World. Now their stories are being told thanks to the work of forensic anthropologists who have been examining many of the human remains uncovered by the Jamestown Rediscovery Project.

Colonists buried many of their first dead within James Fort itself, abiding by a Virginia Company directive to conceal their casualties from watchful Native Americans keeping track of their numbers. Some of these skeletons can be identified as newly arrived Europeans, not only by their features, but by the relatively low concentrations of the isotope carbon-13 in their bone tissue, a consequence of a European diet based on wheat, barley and rye. Those who stayed long enough to become corn-fed Americans bear a different isotopic signature.

"The kinds of studies I'm doing today with these skeletons you would never have been thought possible 30 years ago," says Doug Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. "In some cases I think we'll be able to identify individuals." With that, America will know the final resting places of its founders.

One grand experiment
They may have founded a nation, but the first English people to arrive in Jamestown were more like scientist-entrepreneurs than conquerors.

Their arrival was part of a project run by the Virginia Company, a business venture with priorities that ranged from finding a passage to the Orient to jump-starting an English brass industry.

In the early 17th century, England had domestic sources of copper but no zinc-bearing minerals for brass-making. Among the recent finds at Jamestown are scraps of copper that were brought from England both for trade with the Native Americans and also for experimental metallurgy with local ores. Residue in crucibles recovered by archaeologists suggests that the metalwork began almost immediately after the colonists arrived. "They didn't have a good understanding of what they might find," says archaeologist Carter Hudgins, who has studied the metals found at Jamestown. "They were simply looking at the resources, hoping to find something that could be used to manufacture brass."

The experiments were short-lived. The need to survive and defend the colony against attack soon took up all the attention of the 34 colonists who survived the first year. Other ventures, including glass-making, were started and then abandoned. Not until tobacco began to make its way from Jamestown did the colony finally fulfil its core mandate to make money. "The name of the game at Jamestown was making a profit," says Hudgins.