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National Geographic : 2002 Jun
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it can put written accounts in context. Kelso's excavations have uncovered evidence that the colonists were working hard-at enterprises that met with only mixed success. Vir ginia Company investors wanted colonists to extract New World riches. Instead of spending time growing crops, settlers were instructed to search for gold and other commodities and turn Virginia's raw materials into profitable industries while bar tering with Indians for food. Kelso's team has found abun dant signs of the colonists' labors: scores of fishhooks and tons of oyster shells; musket ball molds and Jamestown-cast lead bullets; fragments of earth enware stills for producing acids to refine metals; thick-sided pot tery crucibles used to melt sand into glass; and, most numerous, scraps of copper-leftovers from pieces cut and shaped into orna ments prized by the Indians. Copper was supposed to buy the colonists' food, but two things happened that the Virginia Company did not foresee. First, sailors on the ships that brought and supplied the settlers made clandestine black-market deals Hundreds of 17th-century tobacco pipes told archaeologists they had found James Fort. Sherds of English pottery were among the artifacts that helped them locate its structures. One-of-a-kind finds Illustrate the lives of Indi viduals: A settler may have worn this one-inch-tall glass angel to guard against sterility. Part of an ivory compass (opposite) recalls the Instrument that so amazed Captain John Smith's Indian captors that they spared his life. with the Indians that glutted the copper market and devalued the metal. Then drought took hold of Tidewater Virginia. Recent studies of tree rings have revealed that 1606-1612 was Jamestown's driest seven year period in 770 years. Indian tribes that had eagerly pro vided corn stopped. No amount of copper would change their minds. The English response raiding Indian villages to seize food-provoked attacks that left James Fort besieged. In 1609-1610 the crisis reached a critical stage known as the "Starving Time." Kelso's team has unearthed remains of this desperate winter. Within the fort lay butchered bones of animals the settlers would only have eaten in extreme hunger cats, dogs, horses, rats, and snakes, even poisonous ones. Outside the palisade to the north, in an unmarked, pre 1650 cemetery, lay evidence of hasty burials. Rather than facing east to west, as Christian tradition dictates, the graves were dug every which way. Instead of being wrapped in shrouds, corpses were left in their clothes. And bodies were tossed into the burial shafts, some two to a grave, two face down. "They were just trying to get people in the ground," says Ashley McKeown, a forensic anthropologist on Kelso's team. Most settlers died of "meere famine," wrote chronicler George Percy. Others suffered "swell ings" and "burning fevers." To learn what caused such symp toms, McKeown this year will use a grant from National Geo graphic to study several sets of settlers' remains. Bubonic plague, malaria, and tuberculo sis leave signatures in mito chondrial DNA. Such diseases, along with malnutrition and polluted drinking water, could explain why so many colonists NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JUNE 2002
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