but there was this place in 1607, not 1620, successful attempt to plant a colony. and that's jamestown. but it failed. i mean, that's the impression you get when you read any standard history. and maybe hopefully that's changing. but so when i came out, i said, i want to walk the ground where john smith and pocahantos walked. and he said you're going get wet because it's out in the river. and i looked around, and i wasn't an archaeologist, but i looked around and i saw a cut through the soil in the bank, not far from here, and it showed three different layers of soil. and that's important, as i'll show you how we work with that process. there was a pile of clay, you could tell it had been put in, and there was a ridge behind it of clay. under that was a dark black layer of rich dirt, the top layer said civil war, and had some civil war artifacts. then under that, the dark layer,

it said colonial and had pottery sticking out. and under that is indian, and there were stone tools. i said, well, what is this black layer? i said, that looks pretty interesting. and -- we were on at that time a piece of -- it's really not part of the national park. you're on private property. this is owned by preservation virginia, which is then known as the association for the preservation of virginia. and he said, well, we've never had a chance to really look here. he just gave me that look like hey, maybe something is here. and i said what's that. so put that in the back of my mind, became an archaeologist, started working in virginia, georgia, caribbean, other places. but i always thought, no one has really proved that that fort had washed away. on the horizon was the 400th anniversary of the settlement here. and i thought, wouldn't it be a great thing to do, is to

actually find what's being commemorated, 1607, 2007. so i talked to the landowners, preservation of virginia, for ten years, actually. and tried to say, look, here's a plan, let's do this. and i said, i'm sure it's there. you know. and -- i mean, i wrote that out. we're going to find this. and so they agreed in 1993, began digging right where you're standing, right here. now why? why here? well, the -- my theory was, because the church tower that we were standing next to is a 17th century architectural feature. and i thought, well, one of the documents said that the church was in the midst of the fort. if it that's a church, then if i dig about here, between here and that sea wall, i'll come up with a different color soil where

up right palasade, triangular shape would appear. i started by myself. right here. one shovel, one wheel barrow. and i couldn't -- i mean, i couldn't hold back. i wanted to go -- i knew i had a grant, wouldn't kick in for a couple months, and get other people. so i started here. and i -- and the first day, i was digging right under the grass and i came up with a piece of pottery. and he was roped in, and this woman was here with her son watching this guy, pretty skeptical. and she finally said to me, "what are you doing?" like those -- do people know you're out here digging in sacred properties? and i had that pottery. and i just looked at her and i was pretty manic at the time, because i knew this pottery was old enough to find james fort. and i'm going, "i'm finding james fort" and she sort of

backed away with her son. come on, bobby, let's not upset the nice man. i hope she came back with him. that was '94. 1994. and here what we had done, luckily enough, was to dig in -- this place which turned out to be a filled-in cellar of a building that we have replicated above that we found pieces of, by finding where a post had been put in the ground and left a dark circle stain in the soil. and there was a cellar, and it was full of what -- we found an intact helmet. you can see arrest more that came out of this pit that's in the exhibit before you go. please see that. and the dates of coins. all this stuff was coming out of here. and it was military enough, it was old enough. wow, this is james fort. but it took many years to connect all the dots to be able to tell where and how the fort laid out from that point. i wasn't sure if we were on the west side, the east side, inside, outside, you know, for a long time.

but we went ahead and announced in 1996 that the fort -- some parts of this fort is here. as it turned out, almost 90% had escaped erosion. and so many people came over here and so many died, their possessions were just scattered and buried in things like a cellar, ditches, wells, it just -- wherever there is a hole in the ground, it got filled with some pretty amazing artifacts. so right now the collection goes over 1.5 million objects have been found. the way it's done, you open up an area, usually on a ten-foot square, find a streak that goes through -- pal i sade lines, say okay -- and just follow these things, a square at a time. and then a big area to understand it all. and we'll see a big area when we go at the next stop. all right. let's head to the trenches.

if you all would just go up on the hill, and i'll go down on the trenches here. all right. this is patrol probably the largest trench that we have ever opened up at one time. and what you're looking at is the site of a -- the 1608 church. if you are saying to yourself, what church? these orange flags mark the giant post holes that were dug down as much as six feet or maybe eight, twelve foot between each one of these posts. so if you can begin to imagine a post coming out of these holes here, another, and each one, you can see there's a pattern to

where the orange flags are located. so i knew from a description written by a man named william strachey in 1610 wrote the church is 24 feet wide and 60 feet long. so the minute we begin to find these enormous post holes and 12-foot centers, it began mathematically to add up. so we -- what we do, as i said, we'll open an area, that is take it down to the grade that has not been disturbed. and this is it right here. and at that point look for outlines of soil that has been dug into before. and every place that that -- someone dug beneath this subsoil level, this clay, is detectible. if you have one of these. and you scrape down -- really carefully. it's hard to show up, because

it's dry. but this is mixed soil right here. there's a little yellow splotches and lighter stuff and darker stuff. but on the sides, it's very uniform. that's never been dug into before. but this has. now, these purple flags mark what do you think? >> graves? >> graves. exactly right. there are four graves here that line up in extreme eastern end of this post hole pattern. and that really tells -- is the telling evidence that said this is the church. so the important people are buried in the chancel. we know also from records, and there's a continuation -- a continual interplay of what we find in the ground with what's in the records and what's in the records, where can you find in the ground, back and forth. and we know from the time period the church stood was from 1608 to 1616, according to record, there were four people buried. four people that would have had

status to be buried here that we know. there's the original cleric reverent hunt could be here. he died very close to the time when the church was put up in 1608. could be. and he could -- i would assume that he would be this guy right here. there was a knight, then two captains that died during that time. we have a plan to actually uncover the remains and see if we can identify these people beginning next spring. i think they should be marked. i mean, the whole church was just -- the location lost. although there was a spanish spy map, and that's what this little sketch is based on, that had an x. and always thought x might mark the spot, you know. and it does. this is where the church is. just a little off center -- it's in the midst, but not exactly in the center. i had my ambition to walk where

john smith and pocahontas walked. there is a post hole there and one right here. this makes a rectangular space that would be the chancel. pocahontas marries john rolf in this church in 1614. so i guarantee you i'm standing exactly a little deeper than she was. but this is where pocahontas stood when she got married. 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 m