Jamestown, est. 1607. First permanent English colony, home of Pocahontas... and it's now an active archeological site.
The original James Fort had been abandoned, overgrown and thought lost to erosion until archeologists found it again in 1994. They've been digging up artifacts since.
Statue of John Smith. Unlike the Disney version, here he's characterized as boastful and arrogant.
We got to watch archeologists at work, and they even let kids help sort some of the trash from inside the wells. (Fish scales, bits of brick, crab, burnt wood, copper.) Inside the museum, we saw one of the most shocking finds: the skull of a 14-year-old girl who'd been cannibalized.
We were allowed to handle some of the artifacts, like this piece of a German jug.This is the exact spot where Pocahontas married John Rolfe in 1614.When the wells dried up, the settlers stuffed them with trash and covered them up. Kids could help sort the trash to find clues about how people lived in the 1600s.This brick church was built on top of the ruins of the original brick church for the tricentennial in 1907.The AC in the museum was a relief. That little building is the cafe. (Ice cream!)The trail through Jamestown, where you can see brick reconstructions of the footprints of old buildings. There were multiple fires that destroyed the entire settlement.Turkey buzzard?Active archeological excavating!A blacksmith-made nail.Ferry boats look different in Virginia!Glass is made from a mixture of sand, ash and lime (crushed oyster shells) heated to 2400 degrees. Pretty toasty job on a sweltering summer day. Today that's a gas furnace, but in the early 1600s, it took the English settlers 2 weeks to stoke their fire hot enough to achieve a melt.Handblown glass made on site using 1609 techniques.
