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National Geographic : 1982 Jan
Contents
her; rainwater filled the pit; silt washed from its sides, and fast-growing weeds and grasses sprouted in the mud. Together they concealed her even from scavenging ani mals. She had chosen a hiding place so secure that it kept her safe for 357 years. Finding three women and no separately buried men in the vicinity of the compound was in itself a surprise. Men, certainly, had been there, for pieces of weapons and armor were scattered through the pits. Recogniz ing relics of distaff life is always hard, for even kitchen equipment would have been used by men in the absence of women. At the same time, many a Virginia housewife would have taken a man's ax to split her own wood. Archaeologists therefore have diffi culty recognizing a lady. I HAD IDENTIFIED a group of nine small, rose-decorated metal buttons as coming from a man's doublet, but when I sent drawings to a costume expert at Lon don's Victoria and Albert Museum, back came the suggestion that they had orna mented a woman's dress. My thinking turned to Granny in the Ground-Granny who dressed her hair as would befit a lady used to wearing a gown decorated with rose embossed buttons. Was it not strange, I thought, that around her skeleton we had found not a single trace of clothing? Perhaps the grouping of the buttons south of the house was telling us where she was at tacked, and offering another reason why, stripped and bleeding, she fled no farther than the pit. Everything fitted, until, like Aesop's dog, I was undone by greed. Seeking confirma tion that the buttons came from a woman's dress, I wrote to Jan Baart, city archaeolo gist for Amsterdam and an authority on 17th-century buttons. Back came a photo graph of an original garment fitted with similar decorative buttons. But it wasn't a woman's dress; it was a man's doublet, and a bricklayer's doublet at that! But how did Jan Baart know that it had belonged to a bricklayer? In 1619 the religious dissident and lawyer, Huig de Groot, better known as Hugo Gro tius and the author of the concepts of free dom of the seas and international law, was imprisoned in the fortress at Loevestein in the Netherlands. In time his guards allowed him to resume his writing, to which end books were brought in and out of the prison in a large wooden chest. On March 22, 1621, the books stayed and Grotius went. On reaching the home of a friend, he bor rowed a bricklayer's clothes and tools, and thus disguised, he escaped to Antwerp. Although Grotius had deftly unzipped my Granny's dress theory, his borrowed doub let provided an almost unbelievable piece of documentation: It proved that buttons like ours were in use in Europe just a year to the day before the Indians struck at Martin's Hundred. We stopped digging two years ago, but in the laboratory treatment of the artifacts goes on, and the discoveries being made there can be as exciting and as unexpected as anything revealed by the archaeologist's trowel. Even as this article was on its way to the press, sharp-eyed conservator Hans Barlow dis covered Martin's Hundred's most explicit message. Hidden in the fold of lead used to mount glass in lattice windows was stamped the inscription- xo FiByJ-app of Exceter Conner 6-a- - making the lead our earliest dated artifact. The most likely reading is "John Bishopp of Exeter, Gonner, 1625," although the interpretation of the last word is uncertain. What did the message mean, and why was it concealed within the folded lead where no one would ever see it? QUESTIONS like these keep us con stantly on the alert. The names, the clues, the false leads, the missing witnesses, the bones of mutilated victims are all the stuff of detective fiction, but for us, the archaeological sleuths of Martin's Hun dred, the mysteries are real. One would like to claim that all our jigsaw-puzzle pieces have been fitted to gether through cleverness on our part. But it just isn't so. Chance has given us a wonder fully rich site, and luck has led us by the hand every step of the way. Without it, and incredibly hard work by dozens of excava tors and research specialists, Martin's Hun dred would still be a forgotten name on a damaged highway marker. Instead, Wol stenholme Towne is safely back on the map and into the pages of American history. L New Clues to an Old Mystery
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