Archaeologist unearthed key colonial structures

Ivor Noel Hume who uncovered some of the most important artifacts of early British settlements in Virginia and who, during his three decades leading archaeological studies in Williamsburg, Va, helped redefine his field in the public mind, died Feb. 4 at his Williamsburg home. He was 89.

The cause was not disclosed.

Noel Hume began his career as a self-taught archaeologist in England before coming to Williamsburg, where he became the chief archaeologist of Virginia’s former colonial capital in 1957. He led efforts that unearthed some of Williamsburg’s most important 18th-century century structures, such as the Hay Cabinet Shop, the James Anderson House and the Public Hospital, the first institution on American soil for treating the mentally ill.

Scores of young archaeologists trained under Noel Hume, and he became an eloquent voice for archaeology in television appearances, magazine articles and more than a dozen books.

Archaeological work began at Williamsburg in the 1920s, but when Noel Hume arrived three decades later he helped make it the country’s premier site for presenting the history of Colonial America.

Before Noel Hume, many archaeologists examining early American history were content to dig out the foundations of buildings hidden in the earth and consider their work done. The bottles, pottery and metal objects found among those buildings were often ignored or even tossed back in the earth.

Noel Hume collected the pottery shards and made them his academic specialty. Moreover, he helped introduce research methods that brought a new emphasis to understanding people of the past through the objects they handled.

The first British settlement in Virginia was made at Jamestown in 1607. For years, no trace of the settlement could be found.

In the 1970s, Noel Hume discovered a previously unknown settlement about nine miles away called Wolstenholme Towne. Settled in 1619, Wolstenholme once had more than 200 British residents.

Their numbers were reduced by disease and by a 1622 Indian attack, which killed an estimated 58 of the 140 surviving colonial settlers. Noël Hume found victims’ skeletons haphazardly tossed into graves, as well as visored military helmets and the oldest pieces of British pottery in North America.

“What makes these new discoveries so important is that nothing of the Jamestown settlement and fort dating from 1607 has ever been found,” Noel Hume told the Associated Press in 1979.

Ivor Noel Hume was born Sept. 30, 1927, in London. (The hyphen between his two last names was omitted from his birth certificate.)

In 1950, he met an archaeologist from the U.S. National Park Service, which led to a visit to Williamsburg several years later as a consultant. Noel Hume and his wife, Audrey Baines, also an archaeologist, settled in Williamsburg in 1957. They worked together for years, he as Colonial Williamsburg’s chief archaeologist, she as curator. She died in 1993.

After Noel Hume retired from Colonial Williamsburg in 1988, he worked at an archaeological site on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island, where a settlement that became known as the “Lost Colony” was established in the 16th century. He led a team that found evidence of a metallurgist’s shop, suggesting that it may have been the first scientific laboratory on U.S. soil.

For years, scholars could find no sign of the first settlement at Jamestown, believing the wooden foundations of a fort had been washed away. But Noel Humedescribed in “The Virginia Adventure” where he believed a fort may have stood.

In 1996, one of his archaeological proteges, William Kelso, discovered the site of that first fort at Jamestown, almost exactly where Noel Hume suggested it would be.

At his Williamsburg home, Noel Hume was surrounded by pottery, books and a clock built in the 1740s.

“When I wind the clock every day,” he told the Virginian Pilot newspaper in 2010, “I’m thinking about how many generations heard this noise. Who turned the key before me? Were they happy? With every artifact, I see past the surface to the people who made them and used them.”