Issue 95

July/August 2007

Contents

news

Compassion revealed in Quaker finds

Did comb dress Celtic beard or horse's mane?

Consultation continues over future of Scotland's heritage

Popular Scottish hillfort is probably Pictish

In Brief & Phase 2

features

Archaeology: The Blair Years – How did we do?
Enough of politics, here's the real legacy of the last decade

In Holy Union - Gothic ivories reunited
Mark Redknap describes his eureka moment

Building a New World - Digging up Jamestown
Geoff Egan says the Virginia colony can tell us about Britain

on the web

Recommended websites
Virtual landscapes and research on Hadrian's Wall

letters

Views and responses

CBA correspondent

Campaigns, comment and communications from the CBA
Mike Heyworth on education and training in archaeology

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

Building a New World - Digging up Jamestown

Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, was founded in 1607. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities has been researching the colony. As Geoff Egan explains, their finds add up to a unique bit of the homeland.

2007 marks the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, in the Chesapeake area of Virginia. Recent archaeological efforts have provided remarkable details about the first years of the enterprise, as well as an extraordinary range of finds from a period often elusive in British archaeology.

There had of course been several earlier English attempts to settle in the new world from the late 16th century (like that at Roanoke Island off the same part of the east coast), but they all failed. Jamestown itself came very close to failure through poor diet, extremes of climate, disease and hostile actions by local Virginia Indians. After a very difficult winter in 1609 that came to be called the “starving time”, the small surviving minority of settlers planned to return home: but a relief vessel arrived dramatically just in time. There were inevitably further hardships, but the worst crisis was over.

Named in honour of the English king, Jamestown was a speculative venture by some of the richest men of the City of London, acting as the Virginia Company. The basic idea was to send a group of experts in a range of trades out to the relatively unknown coast, to identify natural resources that would bring a ready profit. Alongside metallurgists looking for ores of precious metals and a vital raw ingredient, unavailable in England, for the manufacture of brass (which at that time had to be imported from the continent), were specialists knowledgeable about glassmaking, clays suitable for ceramics, jewels, perfumes, potential foodstuffs and other economically useful materials to be gained from fish, fowl, animals and plants. In the event, tobacco was to prove to be the long-term profit maker, but this was not initially clear under a king famously opposed to smoking.

The Jamestown settlement became the capital of Virginia, and hence the place where the most important official business in the growing state was conducted through much of the 17th century (until its role was taken over by Williamsburg, with its healthier inland location). While not a thriving community, its status and reputation as the cradle of the English-speaking United States of America ensured that there had been many extensive and productive previous excavations and surveys looking primarily for the remains of the 17th century colony right across Jamestown Island.

The Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project, run by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, began in 1994. Hundreds of thousands of artefacts have been recovered from the site of the small fort set up within the first three weeks of landfall. As much as anything, it is this concentration and scope of mainly English early 17th century material from such a small area that makes the archaeological results so important. Such a chronological focus, with an extensive range of military, domestic and industrial evidence, much of it well-preserved by the high water table, cannot be paralleled at any one site in England.

Perhaps the single most significant finding has been that most of the area of the original triangular fort did indeed survive alongside the James river. The received wisdom from earlier fieldwork, was that the river had eroded away all but a possible narrow strip at the north, a couple of metres wide at most. The gradual realisation that in fact the opposite was true – only a narrow portion at the south had succumbed to erosion, and most of the area survived for investigation – vindicated the early efforts of the excavation team led by Bill Kelso. The fort itself, constructed quickly of substantial upright split timbers, with raised round platforms for artillery at each corner, is precisely as planned in a tiny contemporary sketch made by a Spanish spy (potential European enemies were not all imagined).

A substantial timber-built well within the fort, abandoned in or before 1609, has produced a most impressive assemblage of finds from the colony's earliest years. The military aspects are by no means confined to the structural evidence. A complete iron breastplate is one of several spectacular finds of armour. Another breastplate, slightly less well preserved, has been adapted with the addition of an angled plate at the right shoulder to absorb the recoil from a hand gun (in Europe such armour was worn by men armed with pikes or partisans, rather than firearms). In this new world, mutual distrust between Europeans and the native people meant that in the early years armour was requested as protection against arrows. The impracticalities of energetic activity, while wearing the heavy ironwork in the humidity of swampy Jamestown Island in the hot season, are the most likely reasons for the discarding at the settlement of so many pieces of armour seemingly in good condition. There are also several spiked weapons, and parts of guns and equipment for them.

Hopes of glass production at Jamestown were boosted by the discovery of suitable sand very close by. The site of the original glasshouse was excavated last century, and the remains of the furnace are on display (reproduction glasses can be purchased). During a visit to the excavations in 1994, I was struck immediately by a table top full of fragments of pale green window glass, as it was exactly what was then on my desk back in London (from windows smashed in the Reformation at Bermondsey Abbey in Southwark). Closer investigation revealed a very few sherds of red and other colours among what must have been a batch of glass, presumably brought over from an old ecclesiastical or high-status building in London after being sorted for colour and transparency appropriate for windows and drinking vessels. This must have been intended for cullet – a kind of seed material around which any suitable local raw materials could readily be made into more glass.

Precious metals seem to have been elusive, though there is a large amount of material from copper-alloy working. Investigations by Carter Hudgins suggests that crucibles and a variety of sheet-metal offcuts may relate to the search for alloys to match samples brought from Europe. Particularly desirable was calamine zinc (or a substitute), unavailable in England, to help produce brass there and thus to undercut the costly import from the Low Countries and especially Germany.Afew offcuts from sheet discs may be waste from pendants given to the North American Indians, of the kind made from native copper (found further north) and long employed by them as status symbols. Many basic tools – knives, files and axes, and spades and hoes for cultivation – have been found.

There are also several notable domestic items, including a complete pewter flagon from the well. Some fragments of very fine metalwork are difficult to parallel from excavations in Britain – such as a silver angel figure, an elaborate copper alloy renaissance-style leg from an ornate chest, and a boy playing a rebeck. More mundane is a great range mainly of English and German pottery.

Textiles are represented by the lead seals put on each commercially-produced cloth as part of a system of quality control. The earliest ones have Elizabeth I's initials, perhaps an indication that provisions sent out to this remote community, where any complaint about inferior goods would take months, might occasionally be old stock. If they were on the original ships laden in 1606, these cloths must have been at least four years old when dispatched – plenty of time for damp and moth to do considerable damage.

One weaver's seal has a parallel from the site of a Jacobean dyehouse in London, where the cloth to which it was attached was coloured – a further potential link through a provincial cloth perhaps brought to the capital for dyeing before being dispatched to America. Like the ceramics, the colony's cloths (as indicated by the seals) included a substantial London element in the first years, but from the 1620s west country products become more prominent, with provisioning via the closer ports of Exeter, Plymouth, Bristol and others.

There were also linen-based textiles that England could only furnish with imports. Jamestown has produced several Augsburg seals for cheap fustians (mixed linen and cotton fabrics). These are very common in England, even though they came half way across Europe from south Germany, whereas a couple of cloth seals from Gdansk in the Baltic, perhaps for sail cloths, are not known in England. It is possible that some Poles who went to Jamestown in the early years as technical experts recommended textiles they were familiar with.

The coinage recovered, too, is varied. Alongside regular English issues are several Elizabethan Irish pennies and a few items of continental small change. There are also large numbers of jettons, normally used on a chequered cloth for drawing up accounts, and made in Nuremberg – of the very German brass that the colony was established to supplant in England. Occasional lead tokens have been recovered, some formerly thought to have gone out of use back in England by the turn of the 17th century. A few weights made specifically to measure the content of gold coins attest the presence in the colony of some of the highest value issues, which are themselves elusive.

Medical provision must have been an acute concern in this remote location. An incision knife (a pointed, specialised instrument for bloodletting) is one of the identifiable medical instruments, but as the contents of the barber-surgeon's chest from the 1545 wreck of the Mary Rose show (feature Sep/Oct 2006), only a specific context would allow a much wider range of implements of everyday form to be identified as medicinal. Most telling of contingency planning against potential illness is a fearsome iron tool of a type illustrated in a 17th century manual and known as a spatula mundani, which would be used as a final resort in cases of acute constipation.

Many of the important finds from the assemblage, interpreted by curator Beverly Straube, are now exhibited alongside vivid displays of the structural evidence and well-chosen contemporary artwork at the Archaearium – a new museum which opened in May 2006 near the original fort site. One object that will probably not be on display, at least not for some while, is a simple, small rectangular sheet of lead, stamped YAMESTOWNE.

It was unearthed in the early layers and was probably a label for dock workers in the port of London, from which the early voyagers set out, on a pack of goods destined for the new colony. It may come to be among the most well known of all the finds from the site: to raise publicity, it is to be sent into space (hopefully to return safe to earth) on a forthcoming mission by NASA.

This celebratory year is undoubtedly the one to visit Jamestown – do take the opportunity if you can.

Geoff Egan, who has been involved in assessment work in Jamestown, is president of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology and a finds specialist at the Museum of London. Vol 40/1 (2007) of Post-Medieval Archaeology is devoted specially to Jamestown.

CBA web:

British Archaeology

CBA Briefing

Fieldwork
Conferences
Noticeboard
Courses & lectures
CBA Network
Grants & awards

CBA homepage