pocahontas mares john ralph in this church in 1614. i guarantee you i'm standing exactly a little deeper than she was, but this is where pocahontas stood when they got married. had to. had to. they stand right in the chancel, in the center. you've been to weddings. that's kind of, wow, you can actually do that with archaeology. now i want to get you to come down and we're going to get in the trench down there. and just we'll gather out into here. and we have danny smith here, digging away with dan smith. and he is -- you can tell them what you're doing there, danny. >> okay. if my voice can hold up. so what we're doing is difficult. we're digging into a well. and this well happens to be in the southwest corner of the church. now, it looks like that's just a coincidence, though. but we wanted to make sure that it didn't relate to the church. so thus we dig into it, see if we can find diagnostic or

dateable artifacts. it's here until 1817 and it shifts to another location over there. what we've been finding are artifacts later than that date, it looks like it's coincidence. it's a later well. i think it's going to date probably to the mid 17th century. still a 350-year-old well. what we're doing, too, we're actually widening the well. it was a wooden barrel line or cast line well, we're widening the hole five feet if diameter to we can put a steel casing in here to protect as we go down. we have what, six more feet to go? six to eight more feet. >> even though this doesn't relate to james fort. >> okay, thanks. and wells are interesting to archaeologists because we'll probably hit water in another

couple feet and the well went four feet below that, and anything that's been continuously wet will survive. organics. we'll probably find a barrel down there. one of the barrels and any organic things. leather, wood, even metal is in better shape beneath the water because it keeps the oxygen away. a lot of oxygen away. we also found seeds, plants in other wells. in fort wells, they'd be old enough. it's a treasure no matter what. we just can't resist. >> it's amazing that all this is still here to be excavated. >> it is. and nothing substitutes for being here, standing on this soil. that's what keeps us going, you know, to come to jamestown and experience it. this is 18 years of digging.

we're not finished yet. there are big places inside the fort we haven't even looked at inside this one acre. so archaeologists can go on a long time. and fortunately young people on the staff will be available hopefully. it was pointed out that john smith was located pretty interesting place, and that was the ladies of the apba in 1907 decided to put it there. he's actually right where the main entrance to the fort would have been. it's kind of eerie, you know, that there would be that decision to put that there, not knowing anything about the fort. not even -- all pretty much convinced the fort wasn't even here. if toupt just sort of come up to the rope and go around the edges where you can see down in. this is maryann richardson and don wormsley, more staff archaeologists who are working this side now. i mentioned the church was in the midst of the fort.

most of the public buildings were in the midst of the fort. was a store house and that's where the armor would be kept, where the soldiers that would go on duty would suit up. sort of a locker room for the guys. and right next to it in a blacksmith shop site that are marked by the posts we found more than two dozen sword hilts. found just as one of our most interesting visitors showed up, the queen of england. in may of 2007. she came down. walked down the stairs which are right behind you there and looked at that site. and we're finding all these arms and armor, and i was supposed to take her around one-on-one and make sure she had a reflective moment about the history of

jamestown. so, i thought, well, i got to come up with something. i was pretty nervous. so, i said, we're looking at the swords and maryann was actually working on them at the time and said, well, this is the first time that this english equipment has seen the light of day in 400 years. i thought, what if she says i would like to have them back, thank you, it still belongs to us. not really, though. anyway, and what we're doing right now, maryann and don, maybe you could tell us what you're up to. >> okay. what you're kind of looking at is the footprint for one of the post-and-ground structures that were shown over there at the other part of the site. so, we're just taking down each of these trenches and post holes looking for any kind of diagnostic artifacts that will help us -- give us a good firm date for this building and hopefully what it was used for. >> this is a good example of when it's wet you can see the color changes. >> what items have you found in

here? >> let's see. we just pulled out what looks like maybe a little glass petri dish from one of the post holes. the fifth complete vessel we've found here at jamestown. always nice to find something still in tact when you're digging with little pieces. this post hole was just kind of dropped in after they pull ed te post for this building. we're doing some research on that to see exactly what it was used for. but just a lot of little pieces of pottery. there's a piece of bone, for instance, sticking out of this wall right here. let's see, i saw a piece of -- yeah. here's a piece of lead shot from the floor. i mean, there's stuff that was just trampled in. you're welcome to, you know, pass it around. >> i'll show you a couple other sites down here. in 1610 when delaware came in, he said he cleansed the town.

filled wells. i haven't mentioned the other wells. incredible collections of artifacts and they built two long row houses. we knew they were built by 1614 but we didn't know where they were, outside the fort or whatever, right in here, we're marking them 20 inches above the original evidence. the cobble. and they were built with cobble foundation. wood doesn't go into the ground. but these are buildings that were built to last and more like what was being built in england. timber, they were said to be two stories and this one had six rooms because we found three fireplaces and all the crosses marked graves that we found in here. and this dates to we think 1607, this is a 1610 building it's already being built on top of a burial. there's a record of who died in august, middle of september in 1607 there's a whole rash of these gentlemen, soldiers.

there was an older man and younger man buried together. there's a record of an older man and younger man dying. so, i think we're going to be able to put some labels on all these burials. then there was a burial of a boy, of age 14, we can tell that by the forensic development of the bone. and he had many problems, health problems, one of which was an arrow was in his leg. the arrow point is still there. he also had -- his entire jaw had abscessed and it was almost gone and a broken collarbone. those remains actually are in an exhibit at the smithsonian. have any of you heard about the written in bone exhibit at the national museum? you have? good. you ought to see that. because it's about what forensic anthropologists can learn from

modern murder cases on back to the boy and one other person i mentioned earlier we'll talk again about. right over here. as we were looking for the west wall of the fort, we went out here, mathematically it seemed like the fort was bigger than we thought. we started trenching in this area. interesting artifacts, on display at the building with the front glass wall. 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. interesting. i always wondered where captain bartholomew goswold was buried. 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 it's a very, very well preserved skelton, and i can tell you he died at age 35, 36, 37 years old. it's pretty clear. he was 36 when he died. he said it's possible to get dna from burials even 400 years old.

it's mitochondrial dna. we can swab it and 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 co-hon tas 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. new england got all the glory because jamestown had disappeared. all that stood was a church tower, 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 kind 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 time 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 we presented preservation virginia a plan, that bill worked up, a 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 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 wears 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's already after they 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. to get to the tongue and the cheek meat of the dog. we know these are 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 talk about these. 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. 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 bing 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 beatle beetle in this 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-puff 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 woven masks that the clonists 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 table 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 the children protection piece here. this is actually the top of the head. so, this has been switched around -- you know, flipped around. and what's neat is that they actually dissembled this on purpose. you could see where the two elements would hook together. it would hook there and it would hook into the piece right there. and they're adapting to their environment. they're finding this too cumbersome probably to fight the indians wearing all this gear. so, they're taking this