Magnus to Mass., with Jamestown Jaunt, Day 20

Monday, August 25

I hadn’t planned exactly where to go or what to do in Jamestown/Williamsburg, but one thing that everyone agreed on was to see the Jamestowne National Park Archaeological Site. We busted our butts to get out of the motorhome and make it there for the ranger talk at ten o’clock, only to find out it wasn’t happening. It being a Monday on the first day of school, they didn’t expect many visitors and sure enough didn’t get many.

But the archaeology tour at eleven was still going to happen, so we watched their little park movie and then wandered around the museum until time to see the digs.

 

 

 

It was fascinating!  Conducted by an archaeologist who was working on site and took turns with other archaeologists in doing the lecture and walk-thru. She was very enthusiastic about her occupation, and of course, very knowledgeable.  And she was a good talker--I could have listened to her all day.

 

We got to see some of the known grave sites they’d marked; one of them would eventually be excavated. We also got to see them digging out one of the 10x10 plots that they used to look for possible graves over by the river. They were trying to determine the extent of the burial ground and those plots,  while not contiguous to the others, were on land that was planned for a walkway someday. So it was just as good to get them checked out up before construction started.

First they removed the topsoil, about a foot and a half deep. The land had been used to grow tobacco after the grave locations were forgotten, and possibly the old state capital house had stood there too. I got a little confused about what buildings had been where, exactly.

The grave. Somewhere.

In any event, they removed all the topsoil from the 10x10 plot and then you could see the clay subsoil. If a grave had been dug and filled in, you could tell it because the subsoil would be all different colors in the shape of the grave—when the burial people shoved the soil back in, the different layers of soil would be all mixed together. You could easily see where the graves had been in some of the plots, but there weren’t any obvious ones in the area being excavated. Not yet, anyway. I don’t think the archaeologists had dug as far down as they planned to go, because two of them were still working at the plots with flat-bladed shovels.

Fascinating stuff, and we also heard about their discovery of strong evidence for one incident of  cannibalism during The Starving Time—the winter of 1609-10 check this.  I read the article in Smithsonian—they found the skull and  some bones of a 14-year old English girl in the trash pit, with marks indicating  deliberate butchery. The theory is that she died and some of the parts of her were eaten, such as the brain, because it decays rapidly. That seems a little weird to me, but I don’t have all the evidence to support that theory so I cannot argue with it.

But I noticed that the Smithsonian article has information that the archeologist didn’t mention (probably due to lack of time)—there was written evidence from the period indicating that such gruesome deeds may have occurred.

Anyway, it was great. We didn’t get to see everything I wanted to see, but it was pretty overwhelming just with what we did see.

I kept wondering if these big trees were old enough to have seen the fort in the 1600s, but probably not. The magnolia or the bad cypress, maybe, but not these oaks. 

But Molly was waiting at the motorhome, so after the one-hour tour and a short walk around, we headed back. Unfortunately the campground was about 40 minutes away from the attraction,so we wasted a lot of time in traffic.

After we returned Molly and I got in a long jog around the campground, but it was beastly hot.  I don’t think the “long” jog lasted more than 45 minutes, but I don’t have a record to prove it one way or the other.

We ate dinner at Bubba’s Shrimp Shack. I had boiled shrimp with some spicy stuff on them—delicious! And fried fish. And baked beans with way too much bacon, hushpuppies and cole slaw. Very good all.