arc air yum, the building with the front glass wall you see over there. and we also discovered a burial out here in a strange way but we thought that it was -- we found that it was parallel, laid parallel, to what turned out to be the west wall. we dug down maybe two feet, and we found what looked like a spear laying parallel to a row of nails which was pretty clearly the coffin. took it and x-rayed it and saw that it was a decorative spear point, we were able to identify as a captain's leading staff. the captain's would be ribbons, hmm, here's a casket. captain. interesting. i always wondered where captain bartholomew gosnold was buried. he died in 1607.

here's the captain. brought the forensic anthropologist down from the smithsonian that helped us many, many times to identify things. he arrived kind of blind scientifically. we didn't tell him anything about gosnold or anything. he looked at the remains and said, well, this is a very, very well-preserved skeleton, and i can tell, you i think he died about age 35, 36, 37 years old. it's pretty clear. he was 37 when he died. he said it's possible to get dna from burials even 400 years old. but turns out that it's mitochondrial dna. i thought, good, we'll just go swab gosnold and we'll be able to connect this, good luck. if you want to know how it turned out, there's a book that you can have for your very own -- no, it's the whole story. it's an interesting story. i think we have gosnold and he's lying in state in washington in this same exhibit. and there's a complete physical reconstruction of him standing there facing holding his

captain's staff. based on forensic sculptures and interpretation of bone development and that, things that go on. with that i'm done with my tour. and i thank you very much for your attention. >> the jamestown rediscovery project has cataloged more than a million artifacts from the area where john smith and pock pocahontas walked the ground. next american history takes inside to see how history is revealed through artifacts. >> my name is blithe straub, i'm the senior curator for the jamestown rediscovery project. that's a project that started in 1994. it's a project of preservation virginia. the first statewide historic preservation organization in the united states. started in 1889. they started out here in jamestown in 1893.

and so we've got a long history of stewardship of the island, which the ladies who started the apva which is now known as preservation virginia, they recognized this as america's birthplace. they wanted to preserve it. unfortunately, new england got all the glory through the years, because jamestown had pretty much disappeared. all that stood was a church tower from the 17th century. but the site itself, the original fort, was thought to be washed away into the james river. and there had been searches for it on preservation virginia property especially around the anniversary date, 1957 they looked for the fort. the park service did. they had archaeologists out there. they said, nope, there's no sign of it on dry land. it's gone. and if you would come out here as a tourist, the park ranger

would point out to the river and say, you know, that's where it is. that's james fort out there. and there was a lone cypress tree that used to stand out in the river all by itself, and that kind of marked the territory. but we thought, you know, with our anniversary coming up, the 400th anniversary, in 2007, we were thinking maybe it's time to mink again. we know a little bit more about the kinds of artifacts that might represent an early settlement. and i had the privilege of working on contract with the park service looking at their collections from jamestown and putting them on electronic database. and i noticed that there was this early collection of arms and armor, and it came from the area of the confederate earthwork on preservation virginia property. and it just looked like a fort. it was early. it was military. and at that point, bill kelso and another colleague nick

lichetti got involved and looked at the field records to see maybe if something had been overlooked, you know, some feature that looked like a palisade wall or a ditch. and sure enough, they kind of saw some things that looked like right-angled features, you know, that looked like they could be part of palisades defense work. and so we approached preservation virginia with a plan that bill really worked up, the whole master plan of how we were going to do this. it was supposed to be a ten-year project and here we are going on, 18, i think, because we found the fort, oh, wow! the biggest discovery of our lifetime. we're so close to it that sometimes we forget how significant this is, and probably long after we're dead and gone, people are going to finally get excited about this because it is, you know, in our backyard, and it's not, you know, the sands of egypt or

something but it's just as important or as significant as egyptology, you know, work that's going over there. and this was maybe even more important because the documents are so sketchy for us. we've lost a lot of the documents on the virginia company during the great fire in london in the late 17th century. there are a lot of documents that were lost during our civil war. so, what we have left is incomplete, and now with the archaeology we have a whole new record, a whole new set -- data set, you know, from which to select, and the artifacts can tell us just as much as a letter from the past. if we learn how to read the artifacts. that's my job as curator, reading the artifacts. we are now standing in a room we call the vault and that's

because it was built to house our collection. we made special protections for the materials, the floor is above the 500-year projected floodplain, we've reinforced the concrete walls, special block walls. we have special storm shutters that come over the windows. we get really bad storms out here, nor'easters and hurricanes. and we have bullet-proof glass on the windows thanks to patricia cornwell who thought that we needed some extra protection there. and this room houses almost, well, we have over 1 million artifacts now and most things are in acid-free boxes stored by their context on rolling spacesave storage. so, this is the archive. this is where most of the artifacts from the site are

stored. and it's mostly the final material, the lithics, the nails, things we don't need to examine often. and they are stored by where they're found in the fort. so, just like in the library, you can, you know, unroll the aisle. you can walk down and -- so far we're doing pretty well. our storage here even though, you know, you never throw anything away in archaeology, you maintain everything, because you never know when a material will be valuable in the future. but the other things that are downstairs here in this room are what we call the study collection. so, these are the things we need to study more. they represent each area of the fort. the ceramics we're mending together. i'm constantly working on that. and then some things we'll be

using for exhibits in the future, so we want to keep those current. the table behind me has -- is full of stoneware from germany. these are among the most common ceramic wares we find in the early contacts. most are them are bartman's jugs which means bearded man. they have these wonderful little santa claus faces on the neck. the medallions themselves on the belly often tell us something. this one, for instance. i've got it here. there's the three crowns of cologne, so we know this jug was made for the cologne market, but it circulates all over the world. it doesn't mean someone from cologne was actually here at jamestown. i am trying to mend them together.

some are going together quicker than others. if you look at this one, this is almost complete here. he's not mended yet. i've just got him temporarily taped. but he came out of a well. so, you know, often in our wells at the bottom of wells we do find complete ceramic forms because people are taking these vessels to the well to wash out for to collect water and they accidentally knock them in. otherwise things are used until they're broken and then thrown away. but we really -- we like to find wells because the more complete nature of the object. so, i've got flags about the room next to ceramics indicating the countries from which they came from. this bartman jug actually has a date, see, '04. so that would be 1604. and the motif here is the

interior eagle, the double-headed eagle. the materials on this table are extremely interesting because they come from an early well that we found in the center of the fort. we're calling it john smith's well because he did order a well to be dug late 1608 when he was leading the colony, and we -- by the materials that are in it, we believe that this well was fill in in the spring of 1610 just as the colonists had decided to abandon the fort and give up. they were stopped from doing that by lord delawoir the new president who came in as they were just leaving. however, that was after they had already dumped a lot of stuff down the well on their rush to depart. and in here we find interesting things such as evidence of the starving time, winter and spring of 1609, 1610. so, these are dogs.

we have at least 19 different dogs represented from the mandibles, and you can see the cut mark on the bone. where they're cutting at the mandible to get at the tongue and cheek meat of the dog. we know they also had to eat their horses. there's seven horses here. and during the starving time. and i've got lots of, lots and lots of evidence of that, but here's some samples. here's one canon bone from a horse, a leg bone, and it's been chopped very clearly there. and then i've got horse teeth. this one has been really cooked. the teeth are indicating animals between the ages of 10 and 20. so, the poor horses did not survive that starving time. but i've got things also like whalebones.

so, the colonists were eating whatever they could get their hands on. whale. i've got bottlenose dolphin here, the bottlenose dolphin jaw. box turtle, box lunches. they ate a lot of these. they talk about that. we found lots and lots of these shells. but they'd actually scrape out the bones on the inside and reuse the shell as a little drinking bowl. so besides sort of the indications of things they were eating, the starving time, we also have the arrival of a group of cast-aways from the "sea venture" shipwreck in 1609. they spent nine months in bermuda. when they came, they brought be bermuda seashells. like this beautiful lion's paw

scallop. you don't find them that large in bermuda anymore. this is really large. and the beautiful conch shell. they are collecting them like we would, of souvenirs of their voyage, but also if they should get back to england, they can sell these to gentlemen who are collecting exotic objects from around the world. and speaking of exotic object, on this bottle here, which is probably -- it probably held pharmaceutical substance and medicinal substances, we actually found beatetles in thi bottle, and we had them analyzed. i have them in here. you can see them. and they are strawberry root beetle. so, the first documented evidence of this beetle in the new world. and it's not surprising. we've had other soil samples tested.

and we have located bedbugs of and powder post beetles and sawtooth beetles. we know there were black rats brought in from the colonists. so, all these hitchhikers that the colonists were, you know, not bringing on purpose. we have evidence of indian women in this time period being in the fort. and this is a needle made from the rib of a deer. and it's actually if you look closely, it's decorated here, zigzag line. and these were used to make the finely woven mats that the colonists loved. it appears that the indian women are probably sitting in the fort and producing those for the colonists' use. we also have evidence of facing

projectile points or arrow points from the tips of deer antlers. so, that's another native technology that's being produced. this, and here's -- see, these are shell beads made from this mussel. it lives around jamestown. and this is a production site for these beads because they're all unfinished. we've strung these together, but they are not finished. they are all rough around the edges. if they should be finished, they end up being very tiny. they're like this. and so these are -- since they're all unfinished, then we know someone's in the process of making these. and that would be most likely the indian women, because that's part of their role is to make the material culture in their society.

we have a lot of writing from the early period. the most prolific was john smith. and there is a compilation of his work called the complete works of john smith by philip barber we use quite a bit. there were other eyewitnesss, like, other eyewitness accounts, people who were here and they're writing letters back. the communications between the colony and england were really censored very strongly. i mean, the company -- virginia company did not want any negative news to get out. i mean, a little bit did. but they really -- we don't know how many letters got shredded, you know, that they just didn't make it through because they had such negative comments. so, we do have some records. and we know events. we know when ships are arriving. we know from where they're coming. and, you know, it's kind of spotty evidence, but the artifacts in some cases are

illustrating what we know from the records, but in other cases they're bringing up questions of things that were not really addressed in the records. one instance of that, for instance, is children. children don't get recorded because they're not considered important enough. women rarely do as well. but in this early context, john smith's well, we have an object that was used by a child who's teething, a quite young child. this silver whistle and teething stick. this is pink -- this is coral here. it would be much longer. it's very similar to what you see here with king charles as a baby. he's got one in his hand. and so this is quite early, you know, for children. we do know that a couple children were born on bermuda. one of those survived and would have been here by 1610.

and a few ships arrived in jamestown in the late summer of 1609, and they had some women and presumably children aboard as well. you notice that there's not much in the way of iron artifacts out, and that's because we have to maintain them in the room in the back called the dry zone. it maintains an atmosphere, very very stable atmosphere for the artifacts. we keep the humidity level at no more than 20%. and i'll just run in there and bring out something pretty cool for you to see. isn't that looking into the eyes of history? these are elements from what's known as a closed bergonette helmet. it's the visor and what's known

as the bafor or chin protection piece here. this is actually the top of the head. so, this has been switched around -- you know, flipped around. flipped around. and what's neat is that they actually dissemabled this on purpose. you can see where there was a hook there. and they, you know, they're adapting to their environment. they're finding this too cumbersome, probably, to fight the indians wearing all this year. they're taking this off the skull piece so they still have the head protection without this part of it. his is found in a cellar that was first dug in 1607 and filled in by 1615 when another structure was built on top of it. >> >> how many people are doing this work here? >> we have a pretty small staff. i'm the curator and i have an

assistant who helps me with the processing of the material and cataloging. and then we use quite a few volunteers to help in that process as well. especially in the washing and sorting out materials and numbering. but that takes a special person. they have to undergo a lot of training for that because they're very small numbers. we joke by the time we're through with them they can get jobs in the mall writing people's names on grains of rice. so we're training them for this future. and other staff members, my assistants are two conservators who work mostly on the iron artificates, but any material that needs to be stabilized. they'll do. so that's a cure toatorial side. >> i'm one of the archeologists on staff, but i do some

conservation in the lab. what i'm doing this afternoon is conservation of lead objects we see on the site. it has to be preserved. it's a fairly simple process. an object will come into the lab. depending upon how badly it corroded, we'll use a microscope for the procedure, basically, we'll take a scalpel and remove the service corrosion with the scalpel using the microscope, and after that's done, we take the object and put it into an acid bath. which removes the remaining surface corrosion from the object. we put it through a water rinse to remove all of the remaining acid. and then we put it in another solution that essentially

finishes the process of the corrosion removal process. and then the lead object will go into a vacuum chamber or water or remaining water is essentially removed from it, totally dried, and we'll take the object and put two protective clear coatings over it. so after that's done, it's basically hermetically sealed. it's not opened, exposed to the environment, and hopefully, it will remain in the condition it's in while in perpetuity, and then prosably if the object is good enough, it might go into the museum. the pierced lead plate, what they might have been using this for i really couldn't tell you. it could have -- you know, a strainer at the bottom of something possibly. i really couldn't say for sure.

we'd probably have to research it. if you have seen swords, it's the basket. you'll grab the sword here and then the blade will come out this direction. it protects the individual, you know, the other individual trying to slash his hand, a hand guard, it will protect the hand. we found a number of those. michael is preserving this one. >> i'm dan and i'm one of the conservators here at jamestown. i've been here about 11 years. this is michael lavin. he's our senior conservator. and right now, he's working on a sword hilt. and the process that he's doing right now is called air

abrasion. and basically, what it is is it's a mini sand blaster, and instead of sand, we use aluminum oxide. and he's removing the rust from the artifact. you can see the big chunks of rust there are coming down to a darker layer, which we call the magnified layer. that's the last true form of that artifact. so all of the rust, the heavy rust, will be removed. we use air abrasion probably most out of all of the operations in conservation. and it's mostly used for just iron. we do everything from sword hilts, which you have here, to pieces of armor, to tools, to sarious other things. but it's the safest way to remove the rust that we had found. you can see that he's being very careful. he's not shooting directly at the artifact but is kind of

shooting off to the side. and the rust is coming off somewhat easily, but it takes a little bit of work, a little bit of patience, and a lot of skill. takes a long time to develop the skills to be able to do a piece like that. it's normal for us to sit here eight hours a day doing this. and we enjoy it. we really, really enjoy it. and i'm holding a hilt that came out of our, what we're interpreting as the corps deguard. i want to explain one of the processes that are vital to conservation and that's the use of the digital x-ray giment in order to take a picture through the artifact to help guide it and, we knew what it was when it came out of the ground, but it

was corroded with all of this iron oxide. what we're aiming for is this nice and dark, almost black magnetite layer. let's drop it into the x-ray machine. this is our digital x-ray cabinet. the x-ray source is up above. this does the majority of the artifacts that we find. the digital portion of it is the sensor, about 40 centimeters by 30 centimeters and the majority of the cost of this piece of equipment. so we have already warmed it up. let me go ahead and turn it on. and instantly, the pictures should start appearing.

now, what you're looking at is an x-ray through the artifact, and if you look at the sword guards here on the outside, the areas that are in bright white are where there's still some existing metal left, but the areas that are gray, that shows you that there's actually no metal in this. you can see the metal kind of ends right about there. and what that tells us is that we would not be able to elekc electeralicize this object. we would have to use air abrasion using the aluminum oxide under pressure, pushed through a very narrow carbide tip to blow away the surface corrosion product. and stopping at that black magnetite. there's only little pockets of iron, existing iron left, but

this is a very important artifact and one that is most likely going to end up in the museum from fort period buildings. >> well, i have been working on the project since the beginning, since 1994, and gosh, i hope i retire still doing it. i think even if we should stop the project outside, there's still would be lots and lots of work to do inside. actually, archaeology of the future will be working with the collection that has been excavated in the past. and we make discoveries in the lab. not everything is discovered in the field. i think people are under the misconception that all the discovery is in that moment outside, but it happens inside as well. and quite a lot, too. so yeah, there's enough to keep us going for a really long time.