[left that other site]

I just LOVE Jamestown. The last time we had visited the Archaeological dig there, the had JUST discovered the post holes that outlined the ORIGINAL Jamestown fort. The Park Ranger was so emotional about the find that he had many of us in tears!

They also are very respectful to any human remains that they find.

I was very impressed with Jamestown, especially since they keep all the reenacting and replications a half mile away down the road from the actual site.

Thank you for sharing this new find!

[JoeProBono]

[muawiyah]

The original settler at/near the Jamestown site proper was obviously a Huguenot or Swede or (both). The Spanish settlement was further up the James. The site was finally determined just a few years back.

The importance of Jamestown was that it was a LARGE PERMANENT settlement. It wasn't just the first.

Maryland (the other side of the Potomac) as it came to be known had about 20,000 settlers of unknown provence but they showed up in an early population estimate/census of the territory. There's a slightly older Huguenot settlement across from St. Mary's but it was abandoned so early no one knows if it had anything to do with Jamestown. BTW, Jamestown itself was abandoned, and then Williamsburg, the successor town, was abandoned. Europeans took about a century to figure out that it was much better to live UPHILL INLAND due to hurricanes hitting the region.

A much more sensitive archaeological site in the Chesapeake Bay region may be found in Fairfax County on/near Fort Belvoir. The researchers like to keep it secret (more or less) so it can be difficult to get someone to take you there. This one is the site of an enormous Indian village/town that had 15 to 20,000 population in the early 1600s period. We know when Eur/African settlement had been made because the Indians at this site changed the way they made pottery and went into the business of manufacturing and selling their cheap Indian knockoffs up and down the East Coast. There are probably some old crocs from that site in European collections.

For anyone interested in early Black settlement in Virginia, Beacon HIll, just East of Fort Belvoir, is the site of the oldest permanent black village. Today it's a shopping center so little remains of what might have been there originally. Still, we know what they did for a living ~ they brewed stuff. Being quite a ways uphill from the Indian village they were fairly safe from attack by their customers.

Bill Clinton, America's first black President, had his first campaign headquarters in an unfinished office building right at the Western slope of Beacon Hill.