2007-06-18 01:01:38

Archaeologists unearth America's 'lost' history

1. Archaeologists unearth America's 'lost' history

View subtitle: Previous | Next | All

Written by Ivan Semeniuk Jamestown

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.