New discovery identifies 4 founders of the Jamestown colony

Scientists digging beneath the ruins of a historic church at the Jamestown settlement in Virginia have discovered the remains of four leaders from the earliest days of the British New World. All four were found buried within the site where the earliest Protestant church in North America once stood – the same church where Pocahontas married John Rolfe.

Parallel investigations of the artifacts took place at the Jamestown Rediscovery lab, where conservator Michael Lavin and archaeologist David Givens overcame the initial challenges posed by both the box and fabric mass – which couldn’t be opened without causing damage – by locating advanced digital X-ray scanning equipment powerful enough to peer inside them.

The four burial sites were uncovered in the earthen floor of whats left of Jamestowns historic Anglican church from 1608, a team of scientists and historians announced Tuesday. Horn compared the find to the 2012 discovery of the lost grave of King Richard III in England. Furthermore, the researchers said that the analysis provides more insight into the lives and their deaths, but also the important of religious practices in the Jamestown settlement and in Virginia as a whole.

Similarly, researchers were able to link the second grave to Captain Gabriel Archer because it included a coffin and the decayed remnants of a ceremonial staff. Archer was also buried with a silvery reliquary that contained bones and a small vessel used for holy water. William Kelso, director of archaeology at Jamestown Rediscovery, is surprised.

“This is an extraordinary discovery”, Dr. James Horn, president of Jamestown Rediscovery, told the Smithsonian.

On top of his white oak coffin was a small silver, hexagonal box, marked with the letter M, which historians were surprised to discover in Protestant Jamestown. Back in England, his Catholic parents wouldn’t attend the Protestant Anglican Church – being Catholic was illegal at that time.

In May 1607, around 100 settlers founded what would be the first permanent English colony in the Americas on a narrow peninsula in the James River, 60 miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

Researchers say they’re 85 to 90 percent confident that they have positively identified the four men, whose burial near the front of the church in the early 17th century is a mark of their high social standing. He died in 1608 and was approximately 39 years old. Horn said that the artifact may have been repurposed for a New World religion, or that Archer may have been part of a network of Spanish spies or a secret order of Catholic practitioners.

Captain William West’s body was draped with the very fragile silver and silk fabric that scientists later identified as a military sash. “Most people would come and go and die at Jamestown, and nobody would write a word about them”.

The other two men arrived in Jamestown with West after the “Starving Time” in 1610.

Kelso and his team spent two weeks excavating these bones, opening up a 400-year-old window on America’s beginnings.

“The skeletons of these men help fill in the stories of their lives and contribute to existing knowledge about the early years at Jamestown”, said Douglas Owsley, who heads the physical anthropology division at the National Museum of Natural History. The men were identified through a combination of historical documents and chemical analysis of their skeletons. “It’s not John Smith”, Owsley said, referring to one of the colony’s first leaders.

“These were individuals that were so critical to the foundation of America as we know it today, yet we don’t know their names”, he said. Smithsonian research says the three had some success, but the dangers of the colony ultimately proved to be too much.