The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => History => Topic started by: ScottinVA on June 07, 2016, 03:58:14 pm
-
Granted, this article is nearly a year old, but it tells of the fascinating ongoing excavations at the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. Archaeologists are continually finding artifacts and human remains of the inhabitants of America's first English-speaking colony. It's a fascinating place... I live about 25 miles from there.
-----
Jamestown excavation unearths four bodies — and a mystery in a small box (WaPo, July 28, 2015)
JAMESTOWN, Va. — When his friends buried Capt. Gabriel Archer here about 1609, they dug his grave inside a church, lowered his coffin into the ground and placed a sealed silver box on the lid.
This English outpost was then a desperate place. The “starving time,” they called it. Scores had died of hunger and disease. Survivors were walking skeletons, besieged by Indians, and reduced to eating snakes, dogs and one another.
The tiny, hexagonal box, etched with the letter “M,” contained seven bone fragments and a small lead vial, and it probably was an object of veneration, cherished as disaster closed in on the colony.
On Tuesday, more than 400 years after the mysterious box was buried, Jamestown Rediscovery and the Smithsonian Institution announced that archaeologists have found it, as well as the graves of Archer and three other VIPs.
“It’s the most remarkable archaeology discovery of recent years,” said James Horn, president of Jamestown Rediscovery, which made the find. “It’s a huge deal.”
[The man who found James Fort]
The discovery, announced during a morning news conference at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, deepens the portrait of the first permanent English settlement in North America, established here in 1607.
It also raises intriguing questions about Jamestown’s first residents.
More at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/jamestown-excavation-unearths-four-bodies--and-a-mystery-in-a-small-box/2015/07/27/0bb51cb8-2a59-11e5-a5ea-cf74396e59ec_story.html
-
Some might remind that this preceded the 1620 Plymouth settlements in New England, but followed by many decades the Spanish settlements in Florida in 1513.
-
Some might remind that this preceded the 1620 Plymouth settlements in New England, but followed by many decades the Spanish settlements in Florida in 1513.
Exactly... thus, the reference to the first English-speaking colony. But I should've added "permanent" as well... the Lost Colony of Roanoke near Manteo, NC preceded Jamestown by 24 years, but vanished with little trace five years later.