Four hundred years ago, a small group of intrepid English adventurers landed on Jamestown Island in what is now Virginia, starting the first enduring English colony in the New World. Within weeks, they had a pitched battle with warriors of the powerful Chief Powhatan, and attack from the Spanish fleet was a very real threat. So the colonists quickly built a substantial fort that they used for a decade or so, before abandoning it for a more substantial town. A map of the fort, produced by the Spaniard Don Pedro de Zúñiga from an early sketch by John Smith, survived. It was triangular in shape with semi-circular bastions on the corners, and it sat on the bank of the James River.
Lost for some 375 years, the fort was rediscovered beginning in 1994 by a team led by archaeologist Bill Kelso, part of preparations for the 400th anniversary celebrations this year. And what a discovery. Much of the fort’s structure, including palisade walls, bulwarks, interior buildings, a well, a warehouse, and trash pits have been found, largely intact, in the 13 years of systematic research by the Jamestown Rediscovery Project. Thousands of artifacts of all manner have been recovered, informing archaeologists about the first traumatic years of the struggling colony.
This is the story of perhaps the most dramatic discovery in historical archaeology in America, and it is still going on. Kelso tells it with flair and passion, aided by 150 color and black and white illustrations and maps.
Until 1994, nearly everyone believed James Fort had long ago disappeared into the James River. An intensive survey by the National Park Service in 1955 in anticipation of the 350th anniversary failed to locate it, though one wonders how hard they looked. Once again archaeologists were fooled by conventional wisdom, a too common failure, until Bill Kelso and his team decided to look under the tasteless monuments that really did mark the spot.
