burial out overed a here in a strange way. it was parallel to what turned out to be the west wall. we we dug down two feet and we found what looked like a spear laying parallel to a rope nails -- row of nails. it was a decorative spear point that we were able to identify as a captain's leading staff. there is a ribbon on it, he is in front of the troops, they are marching. here is a cap appeared pretty interesting. -- a captain. pretty interesting. -- here isaugust 22 , brought the frantic

anthropologists down this for -- forensic anthropologists down. we did not tell him anything. he looked at the remains and said this is a very well preserved skeleton. age 35.he died about it is pretty clear. because well was 36 when he died. let's swap a gauze and be able to connect this. good luck. -- anis a book interesting story. he is now lying in state in washington in the same exhibit. there is a complete physical reconstruction of him holding his captains staff.

'ssed on forensic sculptors interpretations of bones and things like that. done with myam tour. i would thank you very much for your attention. >> the original 1607 english settlement at jamestown, virginia was lost in history until an archaeologist unearthed evidence of the port in 1994. since then, the jamestown rediscovery project has catalogued more than one million artifacts from the area where john smith and pocahontas walked to the ground. next, american history tv takes you inside the project possible and it's to see how history is revealed through artifacts. the jamesisland is on river about 35 miles from the atlantic ocean. -- takes you inside the project's labs to see how

history is revealed through artifacts. bly: my name is bly straube, the senior curator for jamestown. that as a project of preservation virginia, the first statewide preservation organization in the united states, started in 1889. they started in jamestown in 1893. and so, we have got a long history of stewardship of the island, which the ladies who started the apva, which is now known as preservation virginia, they recognize this as america's birthplace. they wanted to preserve it. so, unfortunately, new england got all the glory through the years because jamestown had pretty much disappeared.

all that stood on the island was a church tower. but the site itself, the original fort, was thought to be washed away into the james river. there had been searches for it on preservation virginia property, especially around the anniversary dates. 1957 they looked for the fort. they had archaeologists out there. nope, there is no sign of it on dry land. it is gone. if you would come out here is a tourist, a park ranger and pointed to the river and say, that is where it is. that is james fort. there was a lone cyprus tree that used to stand in the river that marks the territory. we thought with our anniversary, the 400th anniversary in 2007, we were thinking maybe it is time to look 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 parks 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 earthworks. it just looks like a fort. it was early, it was military. at that point, bill kelso and another colleague got involved and looked at the field records to see if maybe something have been overlooked, some feature that looks like a palisade wall or a ditch. and sure enough, they kind of saw some things that looked like right angled features, that looked like they could be part of the palisade defense work. so, we approach preservation virginia with a plan. bill really worked up the whole

master plan of how we were going to do this. it was supposed to be a 10-year project but here we are going on 18, i think. because we found the fort. 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 are dead and gone, people are going to finally get excited about this, because, it is in our backyard, and it is not in the sands of egypt or something, but it is just as important and as the significant as egyptology, the work going on over there. this is maybe even more important, because the documents are so sketchy for us. we have 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 lost during our civil war.

so, what we have left is and complete, and now, with the archaeology, we have a whole new record, a whole new set, data set, and the artifacts can tell us just as much as a letter from the past if we learn how to read the artifacts. that is my job as curator, reading the artifacts. we are now standing in a room that we call the vault. that is because it was specially built to house our collection. and we have made some special precautions for the materials, the floor level is of above the floodplain. we have reinforced concrete walls, cinderblock walls. we have special storm shutters that come down over the windows. we get really bad storms out here, nor'easters and hurricanes.

and we have bulletproof 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 one million artifacts now. and most things are in acid-free boxes, stored by their contacts on a rolling storage. so, this is the archive. this is where most of the artifacts from the site are stored. and it's mostly the lithics, the nails, the things we do not need to examine often. and they are stored by where they are found in the fort. in the library, you can unroll the aisle. so, you can walk down and, so

far we are doing pretty well on our storage here, even though 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 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 are together. i'm constantly working on that. and then some names we will be using for exhibits in the future. so, we want to keep those current. the table behind me is full of stoneware from germany. and this, these are among the most common ceramic ware. most of them are called bartman jugs, which means bearded man.

the medallions themselves on the bellies often tell us something. they are the three crowns of cologne. we know this jug was made for the cologne market, but it circulates all over the world. it is not mean that someone from cologne was actually hear it jamestown. i am trying to mend them together. um, some are going together quicker than others. if you look at this one, this is almost -- i mean, he's not mended yet. i have just got him temporarily taped, but he came out of a well. often at the bottom of wells we do find complete ceramic forms because people are taking these vessels to the well to wash out

or collect water and they accidentally knock them in. otherwise, things are used until they are broken, and then thrown away. but we like to find wells, because the more complete nature of the objects. i have got flags about the room indicating the countries from which they came from. this jug actually has a date. 1604. and the motif here is the imperial eagle, the double headed eagle. the materials on this table are extremely interesting because they come from an early well we found in the center of the fort. we are calling a 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 this well was filled 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 delaware, the president who came in just as they were leaving. however, that was after they had already dumped a lot of this 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. so these are dogs. we have at least 19 different dogs represented from the mandibles. you can see the cut marks. where they are 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 are seven horses here. and i've got lots and lots of evidence of that.

but here are some samples. here is a bone from a horse, a leg bone. and it has been chopped. horse teeth. this one has been really cooked. the teeth are indicating animals between the ages of 10 and 20. the poor horses did not survive the starving time. but i've got things also like whalebone. so the colonists were eating whatever they could get their hands on. whale. i have got bottlenose dolphin here. box turtles. box lunches? and they ate a lot of these. they talk about these. we found lots and lots of these shells. they'd actually scrape out the bones and resuse the shell as a

drinking bowl. beside the indications of the things they were eating, we also have the arrival of a group of castaways from the sea venture shipwreck in 1609. they spent nine months in bermuda, and when they came, they brought bermuda sea shells. like the scallop. that is quite large. clean conch shell here. another beautiful shell. they are collecting them like we would, as souvenirs of their voyage, but also if they get back to england, they can sell these two gentlemen who are collecting exotic objects from around the world. and speaking of exotic objects, in this bottle here, which

probably held pharmaceuticals, medicinal substances, we actually found beetles. we had them analyze, and i actually have them in here. if you can see them. um, and they are strawberry root beetles. the first documented evidence of this beetle in the new world. we had other soil samples tested. we have located bed bugs. and powder post beetles. we know there were black rats brought in. all of these hitchhikers that the colonists were not bringing on purpose. we have the evidence of indian women in this time period being in the fort. and this is a needle made from the rib of a deer.

if you look closely, it is decorated here. and these are the types of tools the indian women would use to make the finally woven mats the colonists loved. they talked about them all the time. they sent him home to england. they used them as tapestries. it appears the indian women are sitting in the fort producing no for the colonists' use. we also have evidence of fashioning projectile points or arrow points from the tips of deer antlers. so, that is another native technology that is being produced. this, and here's -- see these are shell beads made from this muscle. it lives around jamestown.

this is a production site for these beads, because they're all unfinished. we have strung these together, but they are all right around the edges. if they should be finished, they end up being very tiny. they are like this. so, since they are all unfinished, we know that someone is in the process of making these. and that would be most likely be the indian women, because that is part of their role is to make the material culture in their society. we have a lot of writing from the early periods, the most prolific was john smith. and there is a compilation of his work called "the complete works of john smith." that we use quite a bit. there were other eyewitnesses, people who were here and writing letters back. the communications between the colony and england were really censored very strongly.

the virginia company did not want any negative news to get out. a little bit did, but they really, i mean, we do not know how many letters got shredded, that they just did not 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 are coming. and it is kind of spotty evidence, but the artifacts in some cases are illustrating what we know from the records, but in other cases, they are bringing up questions, things that were not really addressed in the records. one instance of that is children. children do not get recorded, because they are 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, quite young child.

it is the silver whistle and teething stick. this is coral here. it would be much longer, very similar to what you see here with king charles as a baby. he has got one in his hand. and so, this is quite early for children. we do know that a couple of children were born on bermuda. one of those survived and would have been here by 1610. a few ships arrived in jamestown in the late summer of 1609, and they had some women and children aboard as well. you'll notice there is not much in the way of iron artifacts, and that is because we have to maintain them in the room in the back. it is called the dry zone. it maintains an atmosphere 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. it is like looking into the eyes of history. these are elements from what is known as the closed helmet. a visor and the base -- or chin protection piece. this is actually the top of the head. so this has been switched, flipped around. and what is neat is that they actually dissemble this on purpose. you can see where the two elements would hook together. there is a hook there. they're adapting to their

environment, they are finding this too cumbersome to fight the indians wearing all this gear. they are taking this off the skull piece. this was found in a cellar that was first dug in 1607. then filled in by 1617 when another structure was built on top of it. >> how many people were doing this work here? bly: we have a pretty small staff. i'm the curator, and then i have an assistant who helps me with the processing of the material and cataloging. we use quite a few volunteers to help in the process, 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 very small numbers -- and we joke by

the time we are through with them, they can get jobs in the mall writing people's names on grains of rice. other staff members are our two conservatives who work mostly on the iron artifacts, but any material that needs to be stabilized. so that's the curatorial size. don: i'm one of the archaeologists on staff, but i do do some conservation in the lab. what i'm doing this afternoon is conservation of lead objects we find at the site. lead also has to be conserved and it's a fairly simple process. a lead object will come into the lab and, depending on how badly it is corroded, we'll usually use a microscope with the procedure.

basically, we will take a scalpel and remove the surface corrosion with a scalpel. using the microscope. and after that is done, we take the object and we 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 the remaining acid. and then put it in another solution that essentially finishes the process of the corrosion removal process. then the lead object will go into a vacuum chamber or any water remaining water is essentially removed from it. it's totally dried. then what we will do is we will take the object and put two protective clear coatings over it.

after that is done, it is hermetically sealed. it's not open, exposed to the environment. and hopefully it will remain in the condition it is in in perpetuity. and then possibly if the object is good enough it might go into our museum. the pierced lead plates, now, what they might've been using this for, i could not tell you. it could have, a strainer at the bottom of something possibly. i really cannot say for sure. we'd probably have to research it. sword hilts. if you've seen swords it is the basket. you grab the sword here. the blade will come out this direction. it protects an individual if they are -- the other individual is trying to slash. it'll protect the hand.

we found a number of those. michael is conserving this one. dan: i am one of the conservators at jamestown. been here for about 11 years. this is michael lavin. he is our senior conservator. and right now he is working on a sword hilt. and the process that he is doing right now is called air abrasion. and basically what it is is it is a mini sandblaster. and instead of sand we use aluminum oxide. he's removing the rust. you can see the big chucnks of rust there coming down to a darker layer. the last true form of that artifact. all of the heavy rust will be removed.

we use air abrasion probably most out of all of the operations in conservation. and it is mostly used for just iron. we do everything from sword hilts to pieces of armor, to tools to various other things. but it is the safest way to remove the rust we have found. you can see he is being very careful. he's not shooting directly at the artifacts, 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 moment of patients.

-- patience. and a lot of skill. takes a long time to develop the skills to be able to do a piece like that. it is normal for us to sit here 8 hours a day doing this. and we enjoy it. we really, really enjoy it. i'm holding a rapier hilt that came out of our, what we are interpreting as the corps de garde. i wanted to explain one of the processes that is vital to conservation, and that is use of our digital x-ray equipment in order to take a picture through this artifact to help guide us in, we knew what it was when it came out of the ground, but it was corroded with all of this iron oxide. and what we are aiming for is this nice and dark, almost black layer. so, let's drop it into the x-ray machine. now, 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. it's about 40 centimeters by 30 centimeters, and the majority of the cost of this piece of equipment. so, we have already warmed it up. and let me go ahead and -- turn it on. and instantly the picture should start appearing. now, what you are looking at is an x-ray through the artifact. and if you look at thesword guards on the outside, the areas in bright white are where there are still some existing metal left, but the areas that are gray, that shows there is no metal in this. that metal ends there.