Rust-eaten axes, wedges,
mattocks, and saws recall the struggle to clear a wilderness. The simple
essentials of life in the first desperate years have largely vanished
with traces of the first fort and its frame buildings. But in later
houses the evidence of Venetian glass, Dutch and English delftware,
pewter, and silver eating utensils, and other comforts and little
luxuries tell of new-found security and the beginning of wealth. In all,
a half-million individual artifacts at the Jamestown museum represent
the largest collection from any 17th-century colonial site in North
America.
But archeologists have found more than objects at Jamestown. They sought
to unravel the mystery of that part of the first settlement which
disappeared beneath the eroding current of the James River during the
past 300 years. It has always been known that the island in the 17th
century was connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus extending to
Glasshouse Point, where a glassmaking venture took place in 1608. Over
this isthmus the "Greate Road" ran, and its traces have been discovered
on the island as far as the brick church tower. As the isthmus
disappeared at the close of the 17th century, the river continued to
erode the island headward and build it up at its downstream end, so that
the western and southern shores where the first settlement had been
built, were partly destroyed.
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