When Emily and I were in southeastern Virginia last December for a post-Election Day respite, we made it to Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown Settlement, but we missed Yorktown and Historic Jamestowne inadvertently. This wasn’t for naught, however — if we didn’t have a reason to visit Historic Jamestowne yesterday while waiting for the evening’s entertainment (Phish’s second consecutive night at the Hampton Coliseum in the opening weekend of their 2013 fall tour), we would have been completely oblivious to a blockbuster archaeological discovery made just a few months ago.

Jamestown was a horrible colony

For the uninitiated, while the Jamestown colony remains a significant piece of American political history, because it was the first place in the new world for representative government to exist, it did not survive. I don’t mean “it got old, and people died”; I mean “it got old, people died, and the actual Jamestown ceased to exist.” New Amsterdam doesn’t exist anymore, but you can still go to New York City. There’s nothing at Jamestown besides a couple of museums and some reconstructed buildings.

When English colonists, including one storied Captain John Smith, settled the island where the James Fort sat at the dawn of the 17th century, they just happen to have chosen the worst possible time to settle. Core samples taken from indigenous cypress trees reveal that the worst drought of the 17th century in the area occurred during the years Smith and company tried to make a go of things at Jamestown. Between the saltwater from the Atlantic Ocean flowing into the James River through the Chesapeake Bay, and the arsenic and e. coli bacteria in the Virginia swamps poisoning the aquifers from which the Jamestown settlers drew their wells, they were sort of destined to die off in relatively short order. Add to these simple biological strikes against the English an epic culture clash with the Powhatan natives — a sort of cartel of a few dozen local tribes of native Americans — including a series of pretty protracted and gruesome wars between the two sides, and the odds for any sort of physical permanence for Jamestown were pretty low:

Powhatan military doctrine did not call for an immediate follow-up blow, but rather to wait and see what would happen after inflicting such a blow, in hopes that the settlement would simply abandon their homeland and move on elsewhere. However, English military doctrine did not call for reacting this way. For the next ten years, they marched out nearly every summer and made assaults on Powhatan settlements. The Accomac and Patawomeck allied with the English, providing them corn, while the English went to plunder villages and cornfields of the Chickahominy, Nansemond, Warraskoyack, Weyanoke and Pamunkey in 1622. In 1623 Opechancanough sued for peace. The colonists thus arranged to meet the natives for a peace agreement, but poisoned their wine, then fell upon them shooting them and killing many in revenge for the massacre. They then attacked the Chickahominy, the Powhatan proper, the Appomattoc, Nansemond and Weyanoke.

You get the idea.

There’s no permanent Jamestown, in other words, because there was nothing there worth saving. Much of the archaeological discoveries made in Jamestown have been through a dig site at what was something of a landfill. When an English lord, Sir Thomas Gates, sent to replace the previous governor of the colony (John Smith), finally arrived after some trouble on the high seas (that would later become such a popular story back in England that one William Shakespeare wrote a little play called “The Tempest,” whose events are not-so-loosely-based on the Sea Venture‘s troubles), Gates decided that, in order to rid everyone of the pestilence that had beset them, they should literally dump everything they owned into a hole and bury it all, never to speak of it again. We still do this today, when we rescue a town in the midwest that has been leveled by a tornado: once we save all the people (help the survivors and bury the dead), and worthwhile earthly possessions are accounted for, we essentially bulldoze and truck what’s left into landfills.

For several decades, scholars agreed that enough of the original island where the James Fort sat must have eroded sufficiently that the fort itself was no longer likely still around, nor accessible through a series of digs. But a man named William Kelso, an archaeologist by trade, was willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, and he, along with his colleagues, pled their case to Preservation Virginia and the National Park Service (the two entities that manage the island at Jamestown). They received permission to “turn up what you can find” in 10 years’ time. Their interpretation of historical documents appears to have been correct, and they hit the motherlode: they have unearthed over 2 million artifacts since the mid-1990s, and found the sites of several original buildings in the James Fort, including the original perimeter wall that, contrary to popular opinion, did not, in fact, wash into the James River over time. It was right where John Smith said it was in his letters all along.

So if we’re finding out about life in Jamestown from a 400+ year old landfill, just imagine what archaeologists half a millennium from now will find out about us…

Kelso’s latest discovery: “Jane”

In the landfill discovered by Kelso and his team were animal remains — but not cattle, sheep, or pigs, like you might expect to find at the site of a pastoral/agrarian colony. Rather, they found the remains of snakes, rats, dogs, and cats, each bearing cleavage marks consistent with butchery practices of the day. That’s an indication that things had gotten really bad at Jamestown, and they had resorted to eating pretty much whatever they could find. We know from accounts of the Anglo-Powhatan wars that the English occasionally found trading partners in the natives, but as they resisted trading what the natives really wanted (guns), trade became more scarce — including trade for food.

It turns out that the rates of starvation were worse than anyone anticipated. Enter Kelso’s latest discovery:

But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl.

“The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,” says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation Virginia. “Then, the body was turned over, and there were four strikes to the back of the head, one of which was the strongest and split the skull in half. A penetrating wound was then made to the left temple, probably by a single-sided knife, which was used to pry open the head and remove the brain.”

Much is still unknown about the circumstances of this grisly meal: Who exactly the girl researchers are calling “Jane” was, whether she was murdered or died of natural causes, whether multiple people participated in the butchering or it was a solo act.

The historical records indicate that the Jamestown settlers ate at least some of their dead — “dead fellows” they called them in their records — but the discovery of Jane, and the evident trauma to her body indicates man’s capacity for brutality when he finds himself in dire straits. This evidence give us enough reason to hypothesize that things were so bad at Jamestown that they literally may have killed one of their own — a teenaged girl, at that — for subsistence. And these were ostensibly wealthy Englishmen (well, relatively wealthy; they were rich enough to have servants and to own slaves), not scallawags or barbarians. Check out these videos on the discovery:

There are many more videos at Preservation Virginia’s Jamestown Rediscovery project official YouTube channel.

 Why is this important?

Clearly I’m about five months late to this story. But I take the opportunity to recount it here, while it’s fresh in my memory, for a few reasons.

1. Kelso’s professional achievement is the direct result of challenging the conventional wisdom. Always challenge conventional wisdom, no matter how many people call you a crackpot. You won’t always hit the motherlode, but in the immortal words of Wayne “The Great One” Gretzky, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
2. Historical documents are really, really important, and don’t always mean what we think they mean. Kelso and company’s healthy respect for the nuances and transformation of language over the years helped them draw conclusions about the site of the James Fort, and what actually happened there. The United States Constitution, for example, has been interpreted and reinterpreted by lawyers, judges, and scholars across the past few centuries. But the keys to understanding how we should interpret it lie in the allegories contained in the Federalist Papers, the writings of the Constitution’s architects and signatories in the years preceding the forming of the United States. In other words, perhaps without knowing it, Kelso’s life’s work has provided us with the greatest practical case for constitutional originalism that any of us might be able to make.
3. Jane’s discovery could help change (albeit slightly) pedagogy about American government in the way it buttresses theories of liberty. When I was an undergraduate, my American government professor Nathan Griffith began our course on Day 1 posing the following question to the class: “Why government?” I’ll cut to the chase and say that the answer is “to protect the liberties of the governed,” and among those liberties are negative rights (freedoms from government intrusion), like the right to life. Settlers had a representative government at Jamestown, but if they were slaughtering their own people for the greater good, we can see how democracy can very closely parallel tyranny: enough hungry stomachs will eventually deprive someone of their right to life. That’s what Thomas Hobbes meant when he wrote in 1651 in Leviathan that the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” absent a coherent governing system (laws) to protect man’s negative rights. In other words, this rich political theory on which we base much of classical liberalism has very real foundations; these ideas were not merely the sophistry of the geniuses of the day.

For follow-up

I couldn’t resist picking up a couple of books while I was at Jamestown yesterday. I am simply fascinated by the discovery of Jane, but also by Kelso’s professional acumen as an archaeologist and a thinker. I also learned yesterday that there’s a lot about early life in the Americas I just don’t know. If you’d like to follow along, check out these reading selections:

• Jamestown: The Buried Truth, by William Kelso
• Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures, by Frederic W. Gleach
• The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America, by Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith

I also picked up a documentary about the discovery of Jane — if it’s any good, and enough DC-area friends are interested, I might host a screening at my house.

Virginia map image via Wikimedia Commons. Zuniga map via Wikimedia Commons.