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Thisweek–
week– Jamestown–
The making
of America
Four hundred years on and the English colony that
founded America is finally divulging its secrets
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
“Table scraps offer a snapshot
of life on the edge, and show
how the colonists survived
on oysters, turtles and fish”
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
| NewScientist | 12 May 2007
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
–Casualties were buried discreetly within James Fort–
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
Most of the first colonists to arrive in
but by the relatively low concentrations
corner of the triangle, farthest
Jamestown did not survive their first
of the isotope carbon-13 in their bone
from the shore, where last
year in the New World. Now their
tissue, a consequence of a European diet
summer the team discovered the
stories are being told thanks to the
based on wheat, barley and rye. Those
remains of a buried well. “This has work of forensic anthropologists who
who stayed long enough to become
been a wonderful find for us,” says have been examining many of the
corn-fed Americans bear a different
Schmidt. “We think it’s one of
human remains uncovered by the
isotopic signature.
James Fort’s earliest.” Part of the
Jamestown Rediscovery Project.
“The kinds of studies I’m doing
foundation of a building dated to
Colonists buried many of their first
today with these skeletons you would
1617 sits on top of the well,
dead within James Fort itself, abiding
never have been thought possible
confirming it was dug earlier.
by a Virginia Company directive to
30 years ago,” says Doug Owsley of the
In recent months
conceal their casualties from watchful
Smithsonian Institution in Washington
archaeologists have excavated to
Native Americans keeping track of their
DC. “In some cases I think we’ll be able
the bottom. On the way down,
numbers. Some of these skeletons can
to identify individuals.” With that,
says Schmidt, “we encountered
be identified as newly arrived
America will know the final resting
multiple trash layers –
Europeans, not only by their features,
places of its founders.
predominantly the remains of
death in the new world
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In this section
ira block/national geographic/getty
● Targeting cancer with bacteria, page 8
● Looking for other universes, page 12
● Writing the encyclopedia of all life, page 14
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.
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
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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
one grand experiment
They may have founded a nation, but
the first English people to arrive in
Jamestown were more like scientistentrepreneurs 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 jumpstarting 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.
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.” l
12 May 2007 | NewScientist |