Remains of early colonial Jamestown leaders are ID’d
WASHINGTON — One man was thought to be the first Anglican minister in the Americas. Another, an early explorer of the Mid-Atlantic region, was a rival of Capt. John Smith. And two of them, kin of Sir Thomas West, the governor of Virginia, helped save a colony on the brink of collapse.
All four, some of European America’s earliest leaders, died in colonial Jamestown between 1608 and 1610 and were long thought lost to history.
But a team of researchers from the National Museum of Natural History and the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation announced Tuesday that they had unearthed and identified the men amid the ruins of a church on the site of Fort James. The structure is potentially the first Protestant church built in the New World, and the men’s burial there signals their high status in the colony, the researchers said.
The men, who helped shape the fledgling community during its tumultuous early years, included the Rev. Robert Hunt, thought to be the first Anglican minister in the Americas; Capt. Gabriel Archer, the early expeditionary
leader; Sir Ferdinando Wainman, the cousin of Sir Thomas, the Virginia governor; and Capt. William West, the governor’s uncle.
The discovery is the first to identify the remains of such high-status early European colonists at Jamestown, and it is likely to set off renewed interest in the study of the colony, researchers said, in particular, the role that religion played in the colonial world.
“This is the first colony, and it’s closely connected to what follows, so what takes place at Jamestown in these early years is not separate from the mainline of development of American society,” said James Horn, president of Jamestown Rediscovery, the organization leading the dig there. “This is the beginning of American society, and religion is a very big part of that.”
Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, established in May 1607 near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The men all died during the settlement’s tenuous early years, when colonists struggled to grow enough food to survive and frequently clashed with the Powhatan Confederacy, a Native American tribe that dominated the region.
Archaeologists found the men’s remains in the chancel of the church, which was built in 1608 and later served as the site of one of the colony’s most important early events: the marriage of the Powhatan Pocahontas to the colonist John Rolfe in 1614.
The team of researchers, led by William M. Kelso, has unearthed a slow but steady stream of discoveries about the settlement since they began digging there in 1994, centuries after Fort James was thought to have washed into the James River. They discovered the remains of the church in 2010 and began investigating the four burials in November 2013.
They were able to recover only about 30 percent of each skeleton, but by overlaying findings from forensics testing, archaeology, micro-CT scans, genealogy and other archival records, the researchers said they were confident in the identities of the men.
The Smithsonian Institution has created an interactive 3-D digitization of the Jamestown dig, available on its website, to allow the public to explore the burial site in detail.
Hunt, who died the earliest, in 1608, around age 39, appears to have been given the most humble burial, without a coffin and facing west toward where his congregation would have gathered.
Archer died at 34 in late 1609 or early 1610, during the “Starving Time,” a sixmonth period during the winter of 1609-10, when famine and disease nearly wiped out the colony. Also among his remnants: a small silver box that researchers have identified as a Catholic reliquary, containing seven fragments of bone and two pieces of a lead ampulla, a type of flask used to hold holy water.
If correctly identified, the finding could indicate that Archer, or those who buried him, secretly harbored Catholic faith, even as the colony was outwardly Anglican. Mr. Horn said the small artifact, which researchers were able to replicate with a 3-D printer, was potentially the most exciting discovery of all, with the potential to alter historians’ understanding of early religious history in the American colonies.
The other two men arrived in Jamestown with Sir Thomas after the “Starving Time” in 1610. Sir Thomas, who was also known as Lord De La Warr (for whom Delaware was named), resupplied and then led the colony.