February 2025

Excavations continue just to the east of the Godspeed Cottage. Three postholes — likely for a fence — were found approximately 5 feet apart from each other. About 16 feet north of these postholes, another line of four of them exists. The team isn’t sure of their purpose as of yet. They could be related to an orchard that was here early in the 20th century or they may have lined a road or delineated a property. Hopefully future excavations will help give form to these features. Additional GPR surveys are planned for March and then these excavations will be backfilled. A partial Turk’s head pipe was found in these excavations this month. Similar to the George Washington pipe found last October where a human head adorns the bowl, this one was manufactured starting in the 1830s, likely in France. This is the second Turk’s head pipe in the collection, the previous one was found just east of the Memorial Church.

The archaeological team is excited to receive a new controller for their surveying work. The team uses this controller, or “data collector,” to store locational data for archaeological features and excavations. This tool is integral to their field mapping and photogrammetry. The old controllers, while still functional, were beginning to show their age, being nearly 20 years old. The new model has many upgrades that will make the team’s surveying efforts easier. It has a bigger and brighter screen that should make work in direct sunlight much easier. The new controller interfaces directly with computers via USB, while the old ones required discontinued software to connect to a computer, or the use of a flash drive as a go-between. The new controller was a gift of CarolAnn Babcock and Alice Rybicki, mother and daughter, and both long-time benefactors of Jamestown Rediscovery. You can watch the team unbox the new controller on YouTube.

As part of a FEMA grant to develop effective drainage for the Memorial Church and 1680s Church Tower and preserve them for future generations, a surveyor from Vanasse Hangen Brustlin (VHB) came on site to do a survey that was a first step toward creating a detailed topographic map. Working with Director of Archaeology Sean Romo, the two walked the grounds around the church, surveying the churchyard and all adjacent land. The topographic map will be crucial in determining the current hydrology and the best path forward as much of the island is predicted to be underwater by 2075 should current trends continue. In addition to preserving these historic resources, the survey will also help us plan how best to ensure visitor access in the coming decades as the water rises. Though this survey was strictly of the grounds around the Church, the resulting map will be incorporated into the larger geographic data used by the Jamestown team for all of its projects.

In the lab, Archaeological Field Technician Josh Barber found a black glass doublet button while picking through waterscreened material from the north Tower excavations. Its small size suggests it probably was used on a sleeve. The button’s shank is made of iron. This is one of only about 15 of this type and size in the Jamestown collection. This button was probably manufactured in Bavaria, a state in the southeast of modern-day Germany. Josh has also found beads and lead shot in this context. The curatorial and archaeological teams just completed picking through waterscreened material from Ditch 8 and are now working on materials excavated from a midden in 2021 and a portion of the Zuñiga “flag” ditch excavated in 2023.

The curatorial team has entered close to 1000 new artifact records into Jamestown’s database in February. They are currently populating the database with artifacts found in the north field excavations from 2023, the excavations just west and north of the Church Tower, and the western portion of the “flag” ditch. Senior Curator Leah Stricker, Associate Curators Janene Johnson and Emma Derry, and Curatorial Intern Lindsay Bliss have finished picking the heavy fraction of floated soil from Pits 1 and 5, contexts that are included in a current study analyzing and identifying the species found in Jamestown’s food waste. Senior Curator Leah Stricker will be picking the light fractions of these features and then the team will move on to picking through materials from Structure 166, a mud-and-stud structure found inside and parallel to the eastern palisade wall of James Fort.

Director of Collections and Conservation Michael Lavin and Senior Conservator Dr. Chris Wilkins crawled under the Archaearium museum this month to take samples of brick and mortar from the 1660s Statehouse foundation. The Archaearium was built over the Statehouse, lying lightly on the ground with foundations that avoid the archaeological resources underneath. In the museum’s foyer and gift shop there are sections of floor made of glass that allow visitors to see the Statehouse foundations beneath. Michael and Chris crawled there to take their samples, allowing Senior Staff Archaeologist and Staff Photographer Dr. Chuck Durfor to take photographs of the process through the glass in the museum’s floor. These efforts are part of a new project to sample bricks and mortar from various buildings at Jamestown with fairly tight chronological contexts. These will include the Statehouse, the Governor’s Well, the Blacksmith Shop/Bakery, the Church Tower, and the Kitchen and Cellar. The plan is to use X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) to analyze the brick and determine its chemical makeup. We can then compare the results obtained from the various buildings to see how brickmaking changed from the early fort-period structures (Kitchen and Cellar, Blacksmith Shop/Bakery, Governor’s Well) to the 1660s (Statehouse) to the 1680s (Church Tower). For the mortar, we’ll take thin sections for analyzation under a microscope to ascertain the minerals contained therein. We can then research the evolution of mortar from that used by masons new to Virginia to that used 70 years later. The project is in its infancy so stay tuned.

In the Vault, Senior Curator Leah Stricker is wrapping up her work on Jamestown’s crucible collection. She and Collections Assistant Lauren Stephens have been looking for matching sherds among the pieces in the collection and then mending them. Thanks to their efforts, the minimum number of crucibles is up to 86. Leah is a bit frustrated because there are several cases where she’s 95% sure sherds are part of the same vessel but can’t definitively deem it so without the pieces physically mending together. An analogy is having two pieces to the same puzzle but they don’t connect to each other. When looking for sherds that might be from the same vessel, she looks at things like color, thickness, fabric, and residues from use. Leah is happy to be able to consult with Senior Curator Merry Outlaw, long-time Jamestown employee and ceramics expert, when she is unsure if two sherds might be part of the same vessel.

The curatorial team is preparing for the arrival of an oversized storage cabinet. The tall vertically-oriented cabinet is designed specifically for housing large objects and will alleviate much of the space issue the team is facing in the Vault. Currently these large objects are taking up quite a bit of storage real estate, often on their side, in cabinets designed to house smaller objects. Large ceramic vessels can’t be mended fully because they wouldn’t fit in their current storage cabinets. In preparation for the new cabinet’s arrival, the curators are mending objects and cataloging them in the database. The conservators are building foam mounts to support the vessels in their new home.

Conservator Don Warmke has been making good use of the X-ray machine, taking over 400 X-rays in February of recently-cataloged iron objects. Taking X-rays is one of the first steps in the conservation process. Many of these objects are unidentifiable due to being enveloped in corrosion while being underground for 400 years. An X-ray allows the team to “see through” the corrosion, informing their decisions as to whether it makes sense to try to remove it. Many iron objects in the collection have little-to-no original iron left due to the corrosion process and removal attempts might do more harm than good. Additionally, if the X-ray reveals the artifact to be a nail, of which there are thousands in the collection, it doesn’t make sense for the conservators to spend their time working on it. A notable example of Don’s X-ray work this month is the discovery of two similarly-shaped and -sized artifacts, probably two parts of the same object. One part is nondescript, but the other has an intricate decoration which was visible in the X-ray. The team’s best guess is that it is a sword hanger, used to attach the weapon to a soldier’s or gentleman’s belt. Thanks to the X-ray, the object will be slated for conservation after which we may be more certain of its identification.

Assistant Curator Magen Hodapp is now processing layer “H” of the John Smith Well, the fort’s first well. This layer is the third largest in terms of faunal remains in a well that was absolutely full of them. Like other wells at Jamestown, it was used as a trash dump once its water turned foul. This is a wonderful thing for archaeologists as it contains a record of what the colonists were eating in the earliest years of the fort, including the Starving Time. It is believed to have a very short span of being used as a well, and also as a trash heap, showing signs similar to other features at Jamestown believed to have been filled in as a result of Lord De La Warr’s order to cleanse the fort upon his landing there following that calamitous winter. This well-turned-garbage-dump was open for less than two years from late 1608 or early 1609 until the spring of 1610 when Lord De La Warr arrived. It is rare to find such a well-defined beginning and ending date for a feature at Jamestown and it is highly useful in the analysis of the well, its artifacts, and the features nearby.

Associate Curator Emma Derry is continuing her work processing artifacts from Pit 1, picking through material caught by a 1mm screen, the smallest screen used by our archaeological team. She’s finding tiny items such as seed beads and straight pins, small bones, gar scales and bits of copper. She is then cataloging her finds in the database which data will be included in an analysis of Pit 1 and other features laden with faunal remains as part of a Surrey-Skiffes Creek grant. Curatorial Intern Lindsay Bliss is picking through the heavy fraction of floated material from layer “B” of the John Smith Well. She’s finding beads, copper straight pins, glass, and dozens of clay pipe fragments.

Several members of the collections and conservation teams attended Colonial Williamsburg’s Annual Antiques Forum this month. The schedule was packed and all of the presentations were excellent, but they especially enjoyed the archaeology highlights. Jamestown’s own Senior Curator Merry Outlaw, along with Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation’s Senior Curator (and former Jamestown Rediscovery Senior Curator) Bly Straube together announced the upcoming publication of a book authored by Merry and a collaborative exhibit entitled Following the Dragon: Chinese Ming Porcelain in Early Jamestown. The exhibit will be open November 15, 2025 – July 12, 2026 at the Jamestown Settlement, with Merry’s book available for purchase both at the exhibit and at Historic Jamestown. This is the culmination of a long career of collaboration together, highlighted by the image of the two preparing for an exhibit at the Virginia Research Center for Archaeology, a former division of the Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission (the precursor to today’s Virginia Department of Historic Resources).

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