Digging for the truth at Jamestown

In his 1633 will, John Atkins, resident of Jamestown, asked to be buried 'at the usual place out of town.' It is likely that the burial ground was inadvertently discovered in the mid-1950s during the National Park Service excavations of the foundations of the 1665-98 Jamestown Statehouse, on a ridge of higher ground 700 feet west of the James Fort site. The excavations were prompted by the impending three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Jamestown settlement. That burial ground became the focus of the Jamestown Rediscovery excavations as well. Before the recent study could begin, however, it was important to restudy the details of the earlier Park Service digging.

In 1955 clearing of topsoil around the Statehouse foundations uncovered the soil stains of approximately seventy graves and were able to recover bones from six. The extremely fragmentary remains then became part of the collections at the Colonial National Historical Park, Jamestown. Recent analysis by forensic scientists indicates that among the six skeletons that could be reliably studied there were three males and three females, the women ranging in age from fifteen to thirty-four years old, and the men from fifteen to twenty-nine years old.

While too little of these skeletal remains survived to permit any hope for establishing cause of death, their vast numbers (archaeologists at the time estimated that there might be as many as 300) and their haphazard alignment strongly suggested that this was most likely the final resting place of the estimated 155 of the 215 settlers who died during the 'starving time' winter of 1609-10. The reasoning was that the few left alive during that winter might not have been strong and healthy enough to bury the bodies properly.

Such considerations among others prompted the Jamestown Rediscovery team to study further the apparently early, unmarked burial ground lying below the foundations of the Statehouse complex. Even if this graveyard was not the final resting place of the victims of the "starving time," the burial ground's location beneath the 1660s Statehouse suggested a date in the early years of Jamestown settlement. ...

Over an eighteen-month period, excavation of sixty-three graves resulted in the recovery of the skeletal remains of seventy-two individuals. While many deep graves contained carefully positioned individuals, a number of graves were rather shallow and haphazardly aligned. Some individuals appeared to have been placed in the shaft in a careless manner, and there were a number of cases of multiple burials in the same shaft: ten graves held two burials, and one shaft held three. The multiple graves may have resulted from an effort to minimize contact with the bodies of the deceased by throwing them into hastily dug graves.

In-situ buttons, pins, and other artifacts were found with the remains of three skeletons -- two men and one woman -- indicating that they were buried wearing clothing. Clothed burial was an extremely unusual custom for the time, as clothing was in extremely short supply and considered part of a person's estate.

(From "Jamestown, The Buried Truth" by William M. Kelso. Published by The University of Virginia Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. For more information visit www.upress.virginia.edu.)

(Researcher Brooke Cain searches journals and other sources for talk about the South. She can be reached at (919) 829-4579 or bcain@newsobserver.com.)