A Second Founding
Archaeologist's Feat Gives New Depth to Celebration
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 9, 2007;
JAMESTOWN, Va. -- Once again, the three brave ships will sail the mighty James and moor by Virginia's fair shore.
But this weekend, it will be to the noise of a party -- the 400th anniversary celebration of the first permanent English settlement here in 1607. There will be feasts, music, reenactments and a visit by President Bush on Sunday.
Yet lost, perhaps, amid the celebration of the famed landings, is an achievement of another kind -- one not of adventure, but of science.
Much that is new and exciting in the story of Jamestown is the result of discoveries made in the past 13 years by a white-haired 66-year-old archeologist named William M. Kelso, who found something here no other archaeologist had been able to find in a century of looking:
The long-lost site of Jamestown's fort.
Kelso's findings, unfolding quietly over more than a decade, take Jamestown's story back to its beginning, experts say, and rank among the greatest in North American archeology in the past 50 years.
"It's a big deal," said Carter L. Hudgins, chairman of the department of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. "It's something you thought you'd never be able to look at. . . . We can now begin with the letter A. We don't have to begin with the letter D."
Kelso himself seems astonished. Last week he hosted the queen of England and Vice President Cheney. This week, the president. He chuckles: "This is the whole ball of wax, man."
On May 14, 1607, after a voyage of almost five months -- attended by what was probably Halley's Comet in the night sky -- a hundred or so colonists came ashore on Jamestown Island. It is now a low-lying 1,500-acre tract of loblolly pines, sweet gum trees and marsh grass on the lower James about 150 miles south of Washington.
The colonists, who had left London in December, had sailed into the Chesapeake Bay almost three weeks earlier aboard three ships: the Discovery, the Godspeed and the Susan Constant.
They had been attacked by some Indians and befriended by others and had found the land brimming with wildlife, fruit and flowers, like a paradise.
The voyagers located one likely settling spot, but the water was shallow and their ships would have to anchor out in the river. At Jamestown, the river was "six fathom" deep near the shore, one of them wrote later, and the ships could be moored close and lashed to the trees.
The colonists started on the fort the day they landed -- eventually cutting timber and setting logs vertically into the ground side-by-side, according to their later accounts. The fort was "triangle-wise," George Percy, one of the expedition leaders, wrote, "having three Bulwarkes at every corner like a halfe Moone, and foure or five pieces of Artillerie mounted in them."
By mid-June, Percy wrote, the enclosure was complete.
Over the succeeding months and years, the settlers endured disease, famine and death, as well as friction with the Indians and one another. At one point, the colonists packed up and started for home, only to return after meeting an in-bound ship filled with newcomers.
Decades passed. Jamestown grew and became Virginia's capital. The first Africans arrived in 1619, and slavery evolved. In the 1690s, the capital moved to Williamsburg, the fort crumbled, and the island was largely abandoned. As the tide of history swept inland, Jamestown reverted to farmland, and its name entered the halls of U.S. history.
Archaeology here began in the late 1800s. The first dig, conducted from 1893 to 1903, was led by Mary Jeffrey Galt, co-founder of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. The APVA, a private nonprofit agency, had been given a crucial 22-acre section of the island by landowners in 1893.
More excavation was done in the 1930s. In the mid-1950s, with the 1957 anniversary approaching, the National Park Service, which owns the rest of the island, dug for the fort in three different areas. In one case, archaeologists dredged up the river bottom offshore.
None of these efforts found any trace of the fort, and the consensus grew that it must be elsewhere out in the river.
On April 4, 1994, with a new anniversary approaching, Kelso, now the APVA's director of archeology, jabbed a shovel into the Jamestown turf to begin a new search.
An expert on Colonial America, Kelso had pioneered the archeology of slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, Monticello, and at a former plantation outside Williamsburg called Kingsmill.
A stocky man with a trim, white moustache, Kelso once dreamed of a career as a placekicker in football -- he still reveres the late, legendary Cleveland Browns kicker Lou Groza.
But he found archeology more interesting: Kelso retains an air of wonder at his good fortune at Jamestown. Archaeologists are seldom so lucky and seldom give tours to visiting foreign monarchs.
The story of his quest, however, is irresistible.
"A lot of people came to me and said, 'Look, Bill, you're a nice guy, but there's nothing here,' " Kelso recounted in a recent interview in his office at the site; he also lives nearby. "All the evidence was saying it wasn't there, to most people."
But not to him. He said he thought: "By God, I'm not going to go to my grave saying, 'Why didn't I take a shot at that?' "
Kelso said he has always been awed by the power of places.
"You have all these stories and myths around you, and then you go to the place, and somehow you get another understanding," he said. "It brings this sense of reality to what you can't access any other way."
Kelso said most people thought the Jamestown fort must have been erected near the spot where the colonists tied their ships. That had to be in deep water where the river channel once ran close to the island. But 25 acres of that section had long since washed away, he said.
Among other things, Kelso said, he reread the account of the deep-water landing and thought: "They didn't say they put the fort there; they said they landed there."
In addition, the approximate size of the fort -- 1.75 acres -- could be deduced from a surviving description penned about two years after the landing.
There was also an ancient Jamestown map, apparently drawn in 1608 by Spain's ambassador to Britain, which included a crude rendering of a triangular fort.
And there were remains of an old church about 50 yards from the river, which Kelso figured might be on the site of an earlier church that was said to have been in the middle of the fort.
"The whole key to digging here was the church," he said. Churches might be rebuilt over time, he reasoned, but they are seldom moved far from their original site.
He started digging between the church and the river, guessing that he might intersect with evidence of one wall of the fort.
Within weeks, he said, he had: a straight line of discolored earth that contained precise soil imprints probably made by the decayed wood of side-by-side vertical timbers set in a trench about 2 1/2 feet deep.
Painstaking excavation over the next few years gradually revealed similar evidence of the other two walls and outlines of parts of the bulwarks at the corners, he said.
Not only was the fort site not lost to the river, Kelso said, but 90 percent of it survived -- undiscovered for 400 years.
As the digging expanded, Kelso found evidence of buildings erected within the fort, tens of thousands of artifacts the settlers left behind -- last week it was two ivory chess pieces -- and the remains of about 100 settlers themselves.
Crews even found the hole where Kelso believes the fort's flag pole was.
Taken together, his findings have brought Jamestown a rich new life, deepened the portrait of its early inhabitants and rewritten the opening chapters of U.S. history.
"I just love it," he said as he stood one day recently in the middle of the site, marked with a timber stockade probably much like the original. He said he looks around the place where he has spent more than a decade of his life and thinks: "Wow, look at this."
And he knows that beneath his feet there is much more.
"Another lifetime," he said, laughing. "That's what I need."
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 9, 2007;
JAMESTOWN, Va. -- Once again, the three brave ships will sail the mighty James and moor by Virginia's fair shore.
But this weekend, it will be to the noise of a party -- the 400th anniversary celebration of the first permanent English settlement here in 1607. There will be feasts, music, reenactments and a visit by President Bush on Sunday.
Yet lost, perhaps, amid the celebration of the famed landings, is an achievement of another kind -- one not of adventure, but of science.
Much that is new and exciting in the story of Jamestown is the result of discoveries made in the past 13 years by a white-haired 66-year-old archeologist named William M. Kelso, who found something here no other archaeologist had been able to find in a century of looking:
The long-lost site of Jamestown's fort.
Kelso's findings, unfolding quietly over more than a decade, take Jamestown's story back to its beginning, experts say, and rank among the greatest in North American archeology in the past 50 years.
"It's a big deal," said Carter L. Hudgins, chairman of the department of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. "It's something you thought you'd never be able to look at. . . . We can now begin with the letter A. We don't have to begin with the letter D."
Kelso himself seems astonished. Last week he hosted the queen of England and Vice President Cheney. This week, the president. He chuckles: "This is the whole ball of wax, man."
On May 14, 1607, after a voyage of almost five months -- attended by what was probably Halley's Comet in the night sky -- a hundred or so colonists came ashore on Jamestown Island. It is now a low-lying 1,500-acre tract of loblolly pines, sweet gum trees and marsh grass on the lower James about 150 miles south of Washington.
The colonists, who had left London in December, had sailed into the Chesapeake Bay almost three weeks earlier aboard three ships: the Discovery, the Godspeed and the Susan Constant.
They had been attacked by some Indians and befriended by others and had found the land brimming with wildlife, fruit and flowers, like a paradise.
The voyagers located one likely settling spot, but the water was shallow and their ships would have to anchor out in the river. At Jamestown, the river was "six fathom" deep near the shore, one of them wrote later, and the ships could be moored close and lashed to the trees.
The colonists started on the fort the day they landed -- eventually cutting timber and setting logs vertically into the ground side-by-side, according to their later accounts. The fort was "triangle-wise," George Percy, one of the expedition leaders, wrote, "having three Bulwarkes at every corner like a halfe Moone, and foure or five pieces of Artillerie mounted in them."
By mid-June, Percy wrote, the enclosure was complete.
Over the succeeding months and years, the settlers endured disease, famine and death, as well as friction with the Indians and one another. At one point, the colonists packed up and started for home, only to return after meeting an in-bound ship filled with newcomers.
Decades passed. Jamestown grew and became Virginia's capital. The first Africans arrived in 1619, and slavery evolved. In the 1690s, the capital moved to Williamsburg, the fort crumbled, and the island was largely abandoned. As the tide of history swept inland, Jamestown reverted to farmland, and its name entered the halls of U.S. history.
Archaeology here began in the late 1800s. The first dig, conducted from 1893 to 1903, was led by Mary Jeffrey Galt, co-founder of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. The APVA, a private nonprofit agency, had been given a crucial 22-acre section of the island by landowners in 1893.
More excavation was done in the 1930s. In the mid-1950s, with the 1957 anniversary approaching, the National Park Service, which owns the rest of the island, dug for the fort in three different areas. In one case, archaeologists dredged up the river bottom offshore.
None of these efforts found any trace of the fort, and the consensus grew that it must be elsewhere out in the river.
On April 4, 1994, with a new anniversary approaching, Kelso, now the APVA's director of archeology, jabbed a shovel into the Jamestown turf to begin a new search.
An expert on Colonial America, Kelso had pioneered the archeology of slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, Monticello, and at a former plantation outside Williamsburg called Kingsmill.
A stocky man with a trim, white moustache, Kelso once dreamed of a career as a placekicker in football -- he still reveres the late, legendary Cleveland Browns kicker Lou Groza.
But he found archeology more interesting: Kelso retains an air of wonder at his good fortune at Jamestown. Archaeologists are seldom so lucky and seldom give tours to visiting foreign monarchs.
The story of his quest, however, is irresistible.
"A lot of people came to me and said, 'Look, Bill, you're a nice guy, but there's nothing here,' " Kelso recounted in a recent interview in his office at the site; he also lives nearby. "All the evidence was saying it wasn't there, to most people."
But not to him. He said he thought: "By God, I'm not going to go to my grave saying, 'Why didn't I take a shot at that?' "
Kelso said he has always been awed by the power of places.
"You have all these stories and myths around you, and then you go to the place, and somehow you get another understanding," he said. "It brings this sense of reality to what you can't access any other way."
Kelso said most people thought the Jamestown fort must have been erected near the spot where the colonists tied their ships. That had to be in deep water where the river channel once ran close to the island. But 25 acres of that section had long since washed away, he said.
Among other things, Kelso said, he reread the account of the deep-water landing and thought: "They didn't say they put the fort there; they said they landed there."
In addition, the approximate size of the fort -- 1.75 acres -- could be deduced from a surviving description penned about two years after the landing.
There was also an ancient Jamestown map, apparently drawn in 1608 by Spain's ambassador to Britain, which included a crude rendering of a triangular fort.
And there were remains of an old church about 50 yards from the river, which Kelso figured might be on the site of an earlier church that was said to have been in the middle of the fort.
"The whole key to digging here was the church," he said. Churches might be rebuilt over time, he reasoned, but they are seldom moved far from their original site.
He started digging between the church and the river, guessing that he might intersect with evidence of one wall of the fort.
Within weeks, he said, he had: a straight line of discolored earth that contained precise soil imprints probably made by the decayed wood of side-by-side vertical timbers set in a trench about 2 1/2 feet deep.
Painstaking excavation over the next few years gradually revealed similar evidence of the other two walls and outlines of parts of the bulwarks at the corners, he said.
Not only was the fort site not lost to the river, Kelso said, but 90 percent of it survived -- undiscovered for 400 years.
As the digging expanded, Kelso found evidence of buildings erected within the fort, tens of thousands of artifacts the settlers left behind -- last week it was two ivory chess pieces -- and the remains of about 100 settlers themselves.
Crews even found the hole where Kelso believes the fort's flag pole was.
Taken together, his findings have brought Jamestown a rich new life, deepened the portrait of its early inhabitants and rewritten the opening chapters of U.S. history.
"I just love it," he said as he stood one day recently in the middle of the site, marked with a timber stockade probably much like the original. He said he looks around the place where he has spent more than a decade of his life and thinks: "Wow, look at this."
And he knows that beneath his feet there is much more.
"Another lifetime," he said, laughing. "That's what I need."
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