Ongoing excavations at Jamestown, VA, the first permanent English settlement in America, have revealed grisly evidence that within months of establishing the outpost, its desperate inhabitants had resorted to dismembering and eating a child. Contemporary written sources from Jamestown refer to the winter of 1609-1610 as the ‘Starving Time’, a devastating period when around 80% [...]
1950s time capsule found at Cold War reactor
Environmental workers have made an unexpected discovery while preparing a building on the site of Hanford’s Cold War-era nuclear reactor in Washington for demolition: a time capsule from the 1950s. In a building close to the site’s D reactor – a relic of the Manhattan Project, involved in the development of the Atomic bomb – the team [...]
Straits of Florida: Black Rats & Spanish Pearls
Shipwercked off the Florida Keys In 1622, the Tierra Firme fleet, laden with gold, silver, pearls, and rats, was sunk off the Florida Keys. Sean Kingsley and Ellen Gerth describe 20 years of research into the world’s first deep-sea wreck excavation, and discover a time capsule of daily life from the dying days of Spain’s [...]
Sealing Norse Greenlanders’ fate?
The mystery of what happened to Greenland’s Norse population is one step closer to being solved, as new evidence suggests that the colony did not die out because its inhabitants were unable to adapt to their new environment. The first Viking settlers arrived in c.AD 1000, and over time their population swelled to around 3,000 [...]
Terra Nova Revisited
Another sunken vessel recently rediscovered is the Terra Nova, which carried Captain Robert Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. It has now been found off the south coast of Greenland. Described by Scott as ‘a wonderfully fine ice ship’, after the polar trek the Terra Nova worked as a sealing vessel and [...]
Alaska: Chinese buckle
An ancient Chinese-style bronze buckle found by a team from the University of Colorado Boulder in Alaska may prove the earliest evidence of trade links with East Asia. The CU-led excavations are part of a National Science Foundation-funded project to study human responses to climate change at Cape Espenberg from AD 800 to AD 1400, [...]
Caribbean: Something cooking on Carriacou
A tiny Caribbean island has produced one of the most diverse collections of prehistoric non-native animal remains ever found in the region. Excavations at two sites on Carriacou revealed that five species were introduced from South America between c.AD 1000-1400. One, opossums, can still be found there today, but the other four – peccaries, armadillos, [...]
Smithsonian: Tang Treasures special report
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC has withdrawn from hosting a controversial maritime exhibition. Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds was due to open in the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery in spring this year, but has been cancelled following a two-day conference in December 2011, attended by an international advisory committee of experts that included the [...]
Yorktown: America’s first stoneware potter
Archaeologists in Yorktown, Virginia have found a well-preserved kiln site manufacturing fine stoneware pottery at a time when colonial pottery-making was banned: the illegal pottery was set up as a sign of the growing American desire for economic independence from the British Crown, and a desire to end the imposed reliance on imported British-made goods. [...]
USA: Staffordshire Hoard goes stateside
The Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon treasure to be found in the UK, has gone on tour to America. more than 100 artefacts, including some of the collection’s most famous finds – like the gold and garnet sword-fitting, the helmet cheek-piece, and the folded cross – are now on display at Washington DC’s [...]
Alaska: Oldest subarctic North American human remains found
In Alaska, the cremated remains have been found of a three- year-old child who might have been one of the earliest inhabitants of North America to arrive via the land route. University of Alaska Fairbanks archaeologist Ben Potter and four colleagues found the remains while excavating a fire pit within an ancient dwelling at the [...]
Greenland: Viking victims of climate change
The cause of the sudden collapse in AD 1350 of the Viking settlement established in Western Greenland by Eric the Red in AD 985 has long been debated. Studying marine sediments in the same area of Greenland to reconstruct climate change over the last 1,500 years, Dr Sofia Ribeiro from the University of Copenhagen now [...]
Jamestown: Captain Smith’s pots
A well shaft that was dug by the first English colonists at Jamestown when they arrived in May 1607 was backfilled in June 1610 because the water had become increasingly salty. The rubbish that went into the well, as part of a clean-up of the triangular fortified site ordered by the English governor, Lord De [...]
Proof of first North Americans
First ‘unequivocal proof for pre-Clovis occupation of America’ has been found by researchers at Texas A&M University. Flint knife blades, chisels, and other human artefacts were discovered in sediments that were last exposed to sunlight between 15,500 and 13,200 years ago, according to luminescence dating. These same sediments are also stratigraphically earlier than the layers [...]
United States: The World Trade Center ship
January 7, 2011
Filed Under: Issue 45, Features, USA, With Video
Not long after sunrise on 13 July 2010, two archaeologists descended a long aluminium ladder into a 25-ft deep pit immediately south of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The archaeologists made this descent, as they and their colleagues had many mornings before over the previous months, to monitor the lumbering activities of a [...]
Boat found at base of World Trade Center
Astonishingly, given the devastating events that took place at New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, archaeologists working at the site have found a substantial depth of undisturbed archaeological deposits lying underneath the remains of the iconic twin towers. They include the remains of a Revolutionary-War-era ship that was probably sunk deliberately on [...]
Brian Fagan Digs Deeper
The esoterica of kelp forests Kelp forests are near ubiquitous along the West Coast of North America, as anyone who has sailed or paddled a small boat knows only too well. Kelp grows at an astonishing rate, as much as 0.9m a day, offers rudimentary shelter from ocean swells, and, most important of all, is [...]
Postcard from Chicago
Chicago is a very European city. With the wind whipping up Lake Michigan, it feels like Geneva on an autumnal day until you look back to the forest of extraordinary skyscrapers that make up the heart of this city. More European still are the elegantly tended flower beds that line the main streets, and belong [...]
Brian Fagan Digs Deeper
July 6, 2010
Filed Under: Issue 42, Blog, Kodiak Island
Freezing on Kodiak My travels sometimes take me to relatively exotic places, like a recent brief stay on Kodiak Island, Alaska, which is a hotbed of archaeological research. Some of the earliest maritime societies in the arctic flourished here 7,500 years ago, not as early as at Anangula out off Umnak Island in the central [...]
We are all Neanderthal
The long-standing debate about the relationship between humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) has just taken an unexpected twist with the discovery that some humans have genes in common with our extinct hominid cousins. Some anthropologists have always argued that this was the case, but on the questionable evidence of similarities in skull and [...]
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