at Jamestown Island, Va. For the next 22 years the National Park Service strove—with time out for wars and intervals between financial allotments—to wrest from the soil of Jamestown the physical evidence of 17th-century life. The job is not yet complete. Only 24 out of 60 acres estimated to comprise “James Citty” have been explored; yet a significant amount of information has been revealed by trowel and whiskbroom and careful recording.

By 1956 a total of 140 structures—brick houses, frame houses with brick footings, outbuildings, workshops, wells, kilns, and even an ice storage pit—had been recorded. To help unravel the mystery of landholdings (sometimes marked by ditches), 96 ditches of all kinds were located, and hundreds of miscellaneous features from post holes to brick walls were uncovered. Refuse pits were explored meticulously, since before the dawn of history man has left his story in the objects he discarded.

When archeology at Jamestown is mentioned, the question is often asked, why was it necessary to treat so famous a historic site as an archeological problem at all? Isn’t the story finished with the accounts of John Smith’s adventures, the romance of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, the “starving time,” the Indian massacre of 1622, Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion against Governor Berkeley, and the establishment of the first legislative assembly?

The archeologist’s answer is that the real drama of daily life of the settlers—the life they knew 24 hours a day—is locked in the unwritten history beneath humus and tangled vegetation of the island. Here a brass thimble from the ruins of a cottage still retains a pellet of paper to keep it on a tiny finger that wore it 300 years ago. A bent halberd in an abandoned well, a discarded sword, and a piece of armor tell again the passing of terror of the unknown, after the Indians retreated forever into the distant hills and forests. Rust-eaten axes, wedges, mattocks, and saws recall the struggle to clear a wilderness. The simple essentials of life in the first desperate years have largely vanished with traces of the first fort and its frame buildings. But in later houses the evidence of Venetian glass, Dutch and English delftware, pewter, and silver eating utensils, and other comforts and little luxuries tell of new-found security and the beginning of wealth. In all, a half-million individual artifacts at the Jamestown museum represent the largest collection from any 17th-century colonial site in North America.

But archeologists have found more than objects at Jamestown. They sought to unravel the mystery of that part of the first settlement which disappeared beneath the eroding current of the James River during the past 300 years. It has always been known that the island in the 17th century was connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus extending to Glasshouse Point, where a glassmaking venture took place in 1608. Over this isthmus the “Greate Road” ran, and its traces have been discovered on the island as far as the brick church tower. As the isthmus disappeared at the close of the 17th century, the river continued to erode the island headward and build it up at its downstream end, so that the western and southern shores where the first settlement had been built, were partly destroyed. Thus, the first fort site of 1607, of which no trace has been found on land, is thought to have been eaten away, together with the old powder magazine and much early 17th-century property fronting on the river.

In a series of extensive tests for any possible trace of the 1607 fort still remaining on land, several incidental discoveries of importance were made. One was an Indian occupation site beneath a layer of early 17th-century humus, which, in turn, was covered by the earthen rampart of a Confederate fort of 1861. This location is marked today by a permanent “in-place” exhibit on the shore near the old church tower. Here, in a cut-away earth section revealing soil zones from the present to the undisturbed clay, evidence of 350 years of history fades away into prehistory.

Within the enclosure of this same Confederate fort was found a miraculously preserved pocket of 17th-century debris marking the site of the earliest known armorer’s forge in British America.

Just beyond, upriver, lie ruins of the Ludwell House and the Third and Fourth Statehouses. In 1900-01, Col. Samuel H. Yonge, a U.S. Army Engineer and a keen student of Jamestown history, uncovered and capped these foundations after building the original seawall. A strange discovery was made here in 1955 while the foundations were being examined by archeologists for measured drawings. Tests showed that no less than 70 human burials lay beneath the statehouse walls, and an estimated 200 more remain undisturbed beneath the remaining structures or have been lost in the James River. Here may be the earliest cemetery yet revealed at Jamestown—one so old that it was forgotten by the 1660’s when the Third Statehouse was erected. It is, indeed, quite possible that these burials, some hastily interred without coffins, could date from the “starving time” of 1609-10, when the settlers strove to dispose of their dead without disclosing their desperate condition to the Indians.

Jamestown exploration trenches of 1955 from the air. Landmarks are the “old cypress” in the river, upper left, the tercentenary monument, and the standing ruin of the 18th-century Ambler house.

The highlight of archeological discoveries at Jamestown is undoubtedly the long-forgotten buildings themselves, ranging from mansions to simple cottages. Since no accurate map of 17th-century “James Citty” is known to survive, and as only a few land tracts, often difficult to adjust to the ground, have come down to us, archeologists found that the best way to discover evidence was to cast a network of exploratory trenches over the area of habitation.

During its whole century of existence, the settlement was never an integrated town. The first frame houses quickly rotted away or succumbed to frequent fires. Brick buildings were soon erected, but probably not twoscore ever stood at one time during the 17th century.

Bearing in mind that the massive church tower is the only 17th-century structure remaining above ground today, and the only building whose identity was therefore never lost, you will find only one other identified with positive assurance—the Ludwell House—Third and Fourth Statehouses row. The remaining 140 structures so far discovered by excavating have no clear-cut identity with their owners. To complicate matters more, bricks from many burned or dismantled houses were salvaged for reuse, sometimes leaving only vague soil-shadows for the archeologist to ponder. From artifacts associated with foundation traces, relative datings and, usually, the use of the structure can be deduced from physical evidence. Unless a contemporaneous map is someday found, we shall know little more than this about the houses at Jamestown except for the testimony of assorted hardware, ceramics, glassware, metalware, and other imperishable reminders of 17-century arts and crafts.

Churches

The first church service at Jamestown was held under a piece of sailcloth in May 1607. The first frame church, constructed within the palisades, burned with the entire first fort in