The Dig
In the late 1950s Ivor Noël Hume was asked to head an archeological expedition into 18th-century Williamsburg. Hume started excavating at Carter’s Grove, an early 18th-century plantation near the James River. The excavations continued on and off until the early 1970s when they uncovered a 17th-century site over which Carter’s Grove had been built known as “Merchant’s Hundred,” also known as “Martin’s Hundred.” Hume recalled a stele located about five miles southeast of Williamsburg which marks the site of Martin’s Hundred:
On both sides of this road and extending west was the plantation known as Martin’s Hundred, originally of 80,000 acres. Settled in 1619, this hundred sent delegates to the first legislative assembly in America, 1619. In the Indian massacre of 1622, seventy-eight persons were slain here.1Ivor Noël Hume, Martin’s Hundred(New York: A.A. Knopf, 1982), 21.
At that point the expedition was halted and Hume went on to excavate in other areas of Virginia. A few years later, Hume and his team were asked to continue digging the 17th-century site of Martin’s Hundred and in the spring of 1976 the excavation resumed. Hume was interested in the architectural plan of Martin’s Hundred and thus researched the history of that first colony. He found that originally it was “a walled community with streets of houses, a church, a military storehouse, and a central square or parade, all within the palisades”;2Ibid., 27. but by the 1620s the colony had expanded well beyond the fortress. According to the Martin’s Hundred Society’s records 220 colonists left England in 1618 on a ship named the Guift of God to settle a 20,000-acre tract of land in Virginia. The town was to be named Wolstenholme Towne after the Society’s most prominent shareholder, Sir John Wolstenholme. Hume further quotes The Records of the Virginia Company of London:
The Indian uprising of March 1622 destroyed everything but two houses and “a peece of a church,” and reduced the population of Martin’s Hundred from about 140 to around 62 who may have temporarily abandoned the plantation and sought shelter at Jamestown.3Ibid., 66.
There seems to be a discrepancy about how many lived at Martin’s Hundred and how many were slain during that uprising. But by 1625 it does seem that the number of settlers at Martin’s Hundred totaled a mere thirty, despite the arrival of many more replacements from England during the years after the uprising. This was not as much due to warfare as to sickness and disease and also a change in policy in England. In 1624 James I decided to take Virginia out of the hands of private control and declare it a royal colony. This step threw the legal status of many secondary patent holders like the Martin’s Hundred Society into a state of confusion, and the Society stopped sending settlers and money into a land of doubt.4ibid., 66-67.
But to return to Hume’s excavations. An archeological site is a larger-than-life puzzle board and the archeologist must put the pieces together. One of many puzzles Hume had to solve was Pit 3092. Hume had several suppositions about Pit 3092 which was a burial next to the Long House. The “Long House” was a building about 15 by 60 feet which had been excavated earlier and which Hume believed to be part of the Martin’s Hundred Company Compound.
I read it, therefore, as evidence of supplies shipped by the Society of Martin’s Hundred to be housed in and issued from the company store…Thus, if the store was a store and the Long House was embraced in part by the same palisade that surrounded it, both had to be related. When we remembered their proximity to the fort, logic dictated that they were owned and operated by the Martin’s Hundred management, in short, the two buildings… were elements in a fenced area best described as the “Company Compound.”5Ibid., 191.
Because this burial was so close to the Long House Hume proposed three possibilities: 1) a grave placed so close to a building would indicate that the building was no longer occupied; 2) if the person died inside or close by the building, burying him nearby may have been a prudent decision at the time; or 3) “if the buildings were really a part of Wolstenholme Towne and were destroyed by the Indians, the grave’s occupant might well have been a victim of the massacre, and so been buried by survivors close to where the body was found.”6Ibid., 207.
What Hume first found in this burial was a skull whose mandible had dropped open, giving the appearance of a silent scream from the past. The remainder of the skeleton was crushed but there. At that point Hume again called on the help of Dr. J. Lawrence Angel, the world-renowned forensics authority and physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution. Hume wrote: “If this really was a victim of the 1622 massacre, we had found the oldest documented white colonial skeleton yet excavated in Virginia—in short, our earliest colonist.”7Ibid., 211.
It was obvious to Hume that the victim had been buried hurriedly. It appeared that the body had been flung into the hole, as the left arm had fallen behind the left buttock which was slightly elevated. More important to Hume were the “fragments of charcoal and small pieces of burned clay under the left leg,” which he felt were “evidence of windblown building debris…[to support] the massacre-victim theory.”
Arrival of the English in Virginia [enlarge]
Because the teeth did not have shovel incisors, Dr. Angel determined that the person wasn’t an Indian. He also determined that the lateral bands which had developed across the tooth enamel were evidence of interrupted growth during its development, i.e., a childhood disease or malnutrition. He also found signs of arthritis indicating a mature individual; and the brow ridges, mastoid processes, and details of the pelvis identified the person as a male. The size of the long bones indicated a heavy-set and strong man who stood about 5 foot 9 inches tall. Dr. Angel also concluded that the skull had been crushed by a lateral blow to the head.8Ibid., 211-213.
After the skeleton had been entirely exhumed and Dr. Angel examined it further, he concluded that the victim had not been killed by a single blow to the side of the head. Rather, there had first been a hard slicing blow to the forehead which caused a fracture above the right eye, and after the victim was felled, the lateral blow and a more severe blow to the back of the head occurred.
Later, fourteen more shallow graves were found at another site. The remains were in extremely deteriorating condition—several skeletons left only brown stains, for a few only the tooth enamel survived, and in others there was nothing at all. Hume theorized that these could have been more victims of the 1622 massacre.