by trowel and whiskbroom and careful
recording.

By 1956 a total of 140 structures--brick houses, frame houses with brick
footings, outbuildings, workshops, wells, kilns, and even an ice storage
pit--had been recorded. To help unravel the mystery of landholdings
(sometimes marked by ditches), 96 ditches of all kinds were located, and
hundreds of miscellaneous features from post holes to brick walls were
uncovered. Refuse pits were explored meticulously, since before the dawn
of history man has left his story in the objects he discarded.

When archeology at Jamestown is mentioned, the question is often asked,
why was it necessary to treat so famous a historic site as an
archeological problem at all? Isn't the story finished with the accounts
of John Smith's adventures, the romance of John Rolfe and Pocahontas,
the "starving time," the Indian massacre of 1622, Nathaniel Bacon's
rebellion against Governor Berkeley, and the establishment of the first
legislative assembly?

The archeologist's answer is that the real drama of daily life of the
settlers--the life they knew 24 hours a day--is locked in the unwritten
history beneath humus and tangled vegetation of the island. Here a brass
thimble from the ruins of a cottage still retains a pellet of paper to
keep it on a tiny finger that wore it 300 years ago. A bent halberd in
an abandoned well, a discarded sword, and a piece of armor tell again
the passing of terror of the unknown, after the Indians retreated
forever into the distant hills and forests. Rust-eaten axes, wedges,
mattocks, and saws recall the struggle to clear a wilderness. The simple
essentials of life in the first desperate years have largely vanished
with traces of the first fort and its frame buildings. But in later
houses the evidence of Venetian glass, Dutch and English delftware,
pewter, and silver eating utensils, and other comforts and little
luxuries tell of new-found security and the beginning of wealth. In all,
a half-million individual artifacts at the Jamestown museum represent
the largest collection from any 17th-century colonial site in North
America.

But archeologists have found more than objects at Jamestown. They sought
to unravel the mystery of that part of the first settlement which
disappeared beneath the eroding current of the James River during the
past 300 years. It has always been known that the island in the 17th
century was connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus extending