America’s Most Important Archeological Dig (continued)

C-Span3 is now airing a three-part American Artifacts series on Jamestown Rediscovery’s archeological dig, profiling what Bill Kelso and his team have discovered there since they began some eighteen years ago (1994). Its video vignettes highlight what the colonists accomplished and left us as evidence of how they founded the first permanent English settlement in the New World.       

This evidence helps support the growing understanding of Jamestown’s earliest years and the lives of its settlers. It also fosters the realization that they persisted to create a colony that did not disappear, as propaganda created by Civil War-era New England historians and legend weavers have led generations of Americans to falsely believe.  

 The first of the series (January 8) relates how the Kelso team persevered for ten years to convince the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (now Preservation Virginia, or “PV”), the site’s owner since 1893, to allow them to search for and find the original 1608 James Fort, and what they have learned about it and collected from it. It includes a photo of Kelso’s first day of digging and discovery, and an anecdote of a visitor’s observation. Over a million artifacts have since been recovered, analyzed, preserved and cataloged and form the core of the exhibits at the Voorhees Archaearium.    

 The first segment now available at C-Span’s online video library at the link above.

 The second segment (January 15) was a tour of JR’s archaeology lab by curator Bly Straube, and is also available at C-0S pan's online video library.    

 Look for the third and final segment on January 22.    

If you miss it or can’t receive C-Span3, you can see all three of them on its video library after they are broadcast.

The Virginia Encyclopedia Remembers John Smith

Three days ago was the 404^th anniversary of John Smith’s return to Jamestown from his unplanned and enforced visit to Werowocomoco, and his experience with Powhatan and (as he much later notoriously recounted) Pocahontas.

Brendon Wolfe offers some pithy observations and reminders about Smith and Jamestown’s earliest times in his postings on the Encyclopedia ofVirginia’s blog, which is one of the Virginia Foundation for Humanities’ projects.

This is a link that is well worth following.

Toward a Holistic History of Jamestown; A Book Review

Jordan’s Point, Virginia; Archaeology in Perspective, Prehistoric to Modern Times

      by Martha W. McCartney

      Virginia Department of Historic Resources (distributed by the University of Virginia Press)

      2011

      134 p.

Archaeology is belying many long-held educators' and popular beliefs about Jamestown as America's first permanent English colony. A century and a half after New England historians, principally Henry Adams, denigrated and desecrated its heritage and place in our history in the cause of Union superiority, a more factual picture is gradually emerging from Historic Jamestown and other proximate sites.

At America’s most important archaeological dig, Bill Kelso and his Jamestown Discovery team have enabled us to learn about the size and features of James Fort and the first Protestant church in America that both date from 1608. We know where Pocahontas was wed in 1614, who then was to become one of the parents of our nation’s first economic boom with the birth of the tobacco industry, which has continued, like it or not, for almost four centuries.  He also has investigated and reported on Kingsmills Plantations, one of Jamestown important proximate settlements.

Martha W. McCartney has now produced a well-researched, wide-sweeping and detailed examination of Jordan’s Point, another important early contemporaneous outpost up the James River from Jamestown. In nine chapters over 134 richly illustrated pages, she relates archaeological findings that explore its history from prehistoric to our own times. She also interweaves a needed historical context of the colony’s beginnings and formational events with descriptions of who was living and what was happening at Jordan’s Point, along with results of the archaeology that was performed there from the 1930’s into the 1990’s.

She begins by telling us about what has been found of the indigenous inhabitants of this peninsula just east of the convergence of the Appomattox with the James. This a formidable start for the average reader, who must plow though detail that is replete with arcane reference points about Native American dwellings, graves and other sites. Then she unfolds her more readable contextual chronicle of Jamestown’s early years in the following chapters on the continuing history of Jordan’s Point.

One of her features is the two-page reproduction of a rare, colored version of John Smith’s extraordinary 1612 map of Virginia. It offers a unique opportunity to appreciate its accuracy and detail that are useful even today, as it was used to settle geographical disputes well into the nineteenth century. Now preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, it is the best example of the quality of the book’s many fine illustrations. Many of these are of artifacts recovered by highly respected archaeologists that help us understand what daily living implements were then employed. Among them are well done renditions by Jamie May, Senior Staff Archaeologist at the Jamestown Rediscovery.

Her following chapters describe how Samuel Jordan, an Ancient Planter who arrived in 1611, established his “substantial” settlement (“Jordan’s Journey”) in 1620 with 450 acres from his (and his wife’s) entitlements under the headright system, and then relate its history down to 1986, together with the archaeological findings. She offers good evidence of how the settlers lived, their economic status and relationships with neighbors. Jordan appears to have had some stature in what was then the small Jamestown community as reflected in his providing refuge, following the March 1622 Indian attack, to nearby settlers from Berkeley Hundred, Causey’s Care, Westover and Chaplins Choice and other outposts.

She continues with what happens after Samuel Jordan’s 1623 death, his widow’s defense of a breach of promise suit by a spurned suitor and her subsequent marriage to William Farrar, a former neighbor and plantation owner, and offers an account of “The Archaeology of Jordan’s Journey” together with a history of mid-17^th century Jamestown. She then arrives at the somewhat ambiguous assumption of its ownership by the Bland family, prominent and influential London merchants, from Captain Benjamin Siddway and his wife, the widow of Benjamin Harrison II.  

Again, however, when reading about archeological findings from this era, the average reader should be prepared for another appearance of arcane archaeological reference points that relate the discovery of key Jordan’s Point artifacts.

McCartney then documents Jamestown’s late 17^th century history, and how the Bland family developed Jordan’s Point into prosperous plantation in the 18^th  and Richard Bland II prominently served Virginia in the years leading up to the Revolution. She goes on to recount the Blands’ lifestyles from accounts of their estate inventories and the subdivision of Jordan’s Point for distribution among Richard bland IV’s children in the early 19^th century. She continues with how the Blands held the property up until the Civil War.

The book concludes with her account of Tidewater events and the undetermined destruction of the plantation’s major buildings during the War. She then relates the disposition of the property by Bland heirs in the late 19^th century, and its acquisition by the City of Hopewell in the 20^th.

This book is an important testament to the need to explore, document and characterize other proximate settlements before modern development obscures and destroys all evidence of their heritage. This has happened at Jordan’s Point, which has been obliterated by “Jordan on the James.”

The reader would have been better served with an index and a list of illustrations and maps with the table of Contents. Equally, there should have been an earlier introduction of a regional map locating Jordan’s Point; the first one (as a detail from the John Smith map) appears at page 17, and the first modern (and small) one at page 42. The archaeological reference points could have used some kind of indexing or comprehensible locators on maps.  In addition, McCartney would have benefited from some judicious editing.

These are but minor points. All in all, this is a useful book for anyone seriously interested in a gaining a more holistic understanding of Jamestown’s history. 

  

Another Facet In Viewing Jamestown

Apropos of our postings on Karen Kupperman’s Washington Post op-ed and that of Peter Mancall in Bloomberg offering another view of the First Thanksgiving, we overlooked Daniel Honan’s The First Thanksgiving: Reclaiming Jamestown From the Dustbin ofHistory. Honan offers yet another facet in viewing our American origins.

Honan observes how the ignorance of Jamestown heritage has been providing misguided political fodder to those who should know better. This is an excellent piece that helps open eyes to just how important Jamestown was. 

Daniel Honan is a contributor to Think Tank, an online blog at Big Think, a "digital "knowledge forum."

Why Jamestown Was The Secret To Success

On reading Peter Mancall’s op-ed in the 11/22 edition of Bloomberg, we thought it was worth revisiting the following piece by Professor Karen Kupperman, which appeared in the Washington Post at the 400^th anniversary of the landing at Jamestown:

America's Founding Fictions

By Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Washington Post

Sunday, May 13, 2007; B02

The colonists landed, short of food and supplies, after a long and harrowing transatlantic voyage. The initial exploring party stole a large quantity of corn that the Indians had carefully stored away for the hard winter. They then dug up some graves, looted items that had been buried with the dead and ransacked Indian houses. Furious fighting with the natives soon ensued. Once they had selected a site for their settlement, the migrants endured a winter of death in which they lost more than half their number.

Ah, of course, you're thinking -- Jamestown. All that looting and fighting and stealing and death. It's the creation story from hell. But think again.

That description is not of the troubled Virginia colony settled by a group of men popularly derided, then and now, as the scum of the Earth. Rather, it depicts the arduous first days of Massachusetts's Plymouth colony, our favorite myth of the nation's founding.

These aren't the kinds of events we remember the Pilgrims by, even though the description is drawn from their own words. Instead, our national mythmakers have accentuated the positive to carve the story of the pious Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving out of Plymouth's more complicated, less pure beginnings. In contrast, the earlier Jamestown colony, whose 400th anniversary we commemorate tomorrow, is depicted as a saga of unrelieved degradation and failure, relegated to second-tier status in the history books. But it shouldn't be.

American history today begins with the Pilgrims because their experience in Plymouth has been molded to offer a more acceptable foundation story than the exploitative dog-eat-dog world of the early Chesapeake. The Puritans' arrival in Boston, where they built John Winthrop's "city on a hill," clinched it for Massachusetts.

The Pilgrim story took over as our founding fiction after the Revolutionary War, when New England and the South began to pull in different directions. The Massachusetts colonists were labeled the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1790s, and the agreement they signed on arrival became the Mayflower Compact about the same time. Because Puritanism had come to be seen as repressive (think of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter"), early American leaders such as Daniel Webster brought the Plymouth colonists forward as the kinder, gentler Puritans.

This is the origins story we prefer and the one we promote. We prefer it because we like to think that we are descended from a humble and saintly band, religiously motivated and communal in organization, who wanted nothing more than the freedom to worship God. The individualistic, grasping capitalists of Virginia offer much less appealing antecedents.

Encasing our national founding in a myth of immaculate conception feeds the assumption that the United States is unlike other nations, that it acts in the world only to serve the greater good. Sometimes it even makes the connection directly. Two days before Thanksgiving 2004, U.S., Iraqi and British troops began a major offensive south of Baghdad. The name chosen for the campaign? Operation Plymouth Rock.

But America's true founding story is much more interesting and much more real. All early colonies had tremendous difficulties becoming established. The reports sent home from Jamestown were overwhelmingly dismal; it was all harder than anyone had expected, and everyone had different ideas about how to proceed.

Dismayed by the high death rate and the disorder of Jamestown's first couple of years, the colony's London sponsor, the Virginia Company -- a kind of early venture-capital outfit -- decided to compel the settlers to be virtuous. It imposed the most severe martial law, regulating every aspect of life to force the men to work for the collective interest. The death penalty was ordered for almost any infraction. If civic virtue could be achieved by force, the Virginia Company was going to do it.

In fact, martial law did stabilize the colony (although many ran away to take up life with the Chesapeake Algonquins). But it couldn't foster true community development or create a thriving economy. Yet over the next several years, some colonists and backers came up with a different approach -- and laid the foundations for what America is today. They substituted incentives for iron control. The land was divvied up among the colonists; a representative assembly gave landowners control of taxation; women were recruited as wives for planters; and the professional soldiers were removed.

And voila. The colony began to grow. To get a stake in this new society, young men and women were willing to take on the burden of working as indentured servants for a number of years.

The new design was in place by 1619, 12 years after the first colonists arrived. Life was still hard and major conflict with the Indians soon came, but the essential elements of success were in place. Every colony from that point forward followed the Jamestown pattern. The Pilgrims, who came in 1620, began as a communal experiment, but within four years, they, too, demanded division of the land and began to disperse into family groups.

Americans ever since have moved across the country in pursuit of the dream of land ownership, the innovation inaugurated on the James River. And they have prided themselves on the ingenuity that also surfaced first in Jamestown, where John Rolfe defied the odds by learning how to produce a marketable tobacco crop that became the colony's gold.

Of course, there was a tragic downside, as there is to many success stories. As colonists north and south hacked their farms out of the wilderness, they ruined the Indians' agricultural and hunting economy and forced the natives off their land. And ownership of property soon extended to ownership of labor, as Native Americans and imported Africans were enslaved in both New England and the South.

The truth of our history is that it produced winners and losers. Our founding is not a storybook Pilgrim fable. It's something hardier and more complicated. And it's reflected in Jamestown's great accomplishment: that it was the place where English men and women worked through the messiness of real life in dire circumstances and found the secret to success in building a society -- giving everyone a stake in the outcome.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman is a professor of history at New York University and the author of "The Jamestown Project."

© The Washington Post 2007

According to Peter C. Mancall, the Pilgrims gave thanks, and then gave up on peace

“The first Thanksgiving, as history textbooks have informed generations of students, brought the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony together with local Algonquian-speaking Indians in 1621. Natives and newcomers shared a harvest meal, which most likely included maize (“Indian corn”), various root crops, turkey and venison,” begins historian Peter Mancall’s op-ed in the November 22 edition of Bloomberg.

However, those times later deteriorated into "...war with the Pequots, the original inhabitants of modern- day Rhode Island and southwestern Connecticut, because they feared these natives were preparing to drive the settlers out. At the height of the war, the English and their Narragansett allies surrounded a Pequot village on the banks of the Mystic River, set it on fire and slew the Indians who ran for their lives."   

Professor Mancall also relates how one Thomas Morton vainly tried to ameliorate Puritan/Indian relations, was deemed "profane" and almost a heretic, burned out of his house and banished three times, including back to England.

Peter C. Mancall is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California and the Director of the USC-Huntington Library’s Early Modern Studies Institute. He is also is the author of “Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson -- A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic” and is now writing “American Origins,” which will be Volume 1 of the Oxford History of the United States.

To read the entire piece, click on the headline above or go to:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-23/pilgrims-gave-thanks-then-gave-up-on-peace-commentary-by-peter-c-mancall.html

The New York Times Rediscovers Jamestown

The New York Times has profiled William Kelso’s perseverance and dedication to teaching us about the significance of Jamestown Rediscovery’s progress at America’s most important archeological site. 

In its 11/14 issue, Theo Emery reviews the findings and interpretations stemming from what has been found and what will be explored at the site of the 1608 church where Pocahontas and John Rolfe were wed. It follows the lead of the Wall Street Journal back in 2010 and other similar subsequent accounts that we have been posting in past months.

This is evidence of growing recognition of the importance and impact of Jamestown on our national heritage and how it created the foundations of our nation. Jamestown Rediscovery is a key to enhancing  and effecting understanding of our history and what happened there that has contributed to our national character as it has developed and we know it today.

Emery poses the issue of religion as a major function of the colony in parallel with its backers' and founders' commercial and exploratory goals. It also contrasts the difference of that issue between Jamestown and the yet-to-be settled Plymouth, which is such an important feature of our national founding mythology.

 

You can link to Emery’s New York Times' article by clicking on the above headline or go to

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/ruins-of-oldest-us-protestant-church-may-be-at-jamestown.html.