Bly Straube, APVA senior curator. Photo courtesy APVA.

Preserving the Past

Beverly Straube, Curator, Jamestown Rediscovery, Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities

Can you tell me about the work you do here? Is there any sort of typical day here at Jamestown?

My job is to look at all the materials that are excavated, and basically, make sense of them. We have upwards of 700,000 objects now and every one of them has come through my hands. I have the help of a lab assistant.

Often I’ll be sitting at the computer cataloging context and the archaeologists will come running in clutching something that has just been unearthed. This happens daily – and it’s some kind of spectacular thing – like a coin, or a little seal that would be found on cloth, or a stamp or something that may require further research. Often I’m interrupted, and will do research to figure out what that particular thing is. That may require going to written sources, going on-line, contacting colleagues who are doing similar things to what I’m doing. In other parts of the world, I’ve got contacts in the Netherlands, in England particularly, in Australia and Newfoundland. We’re always comparing notes and saying ‘Have you seen one of these? ‘ And the ceramic materials, as I encounter them, I’m mending those together. So that’s a daily thing.

A 16th-century breastplate and early 17th-century helmet, known as a cabasset, found at the James Fort site. Courtesy APVA Preservation Virginia.

The histories that have been written up to this date are missing this big chunk of material evidence. In many ways, I think they’ve got the wrong picture cast upon our early colony here, because they’re taking the word of these people who had a bias.

Because Jamestown was ignored for so long, it’s special because it hasn’t been tampered with. Thank goodness for those ladies who started the APVA - that they acquired the property and then wouldn’t let anyone dig in it except themselves when they dug around the church. They treated it as a shrine, and they wouldn’t let anyone mess with it.

You can feel the history out there. It’s kind of a magical thing.

That’s what we want to communicate to the people too. This is the place. You can feel it here if you allow yourself. Just think of the people who trod this earth before you. People we’ve heard about like John Smith and Pocahontas but also people we don’t know. We don’t know their names but we’re finding them during our excavations. And they are through their remains actually telling us stories that we never would have known through the records because they weren’t worthy of being documented that way.

Q. This is such a fantastic time to be able to live in to see you working here and unearthing these artifacts to learn about our North American heritage. Is there any way to distill this incredible amount of knowledge that you’ve been able to accumulate over the last 11 years?

I think we’ve had the wrong idea about the beginnings here. For one thing, Jamestown disappeared from view. For another, it was in the south which was rather depressed after the Civil War, and all the good universities were in the north and the histories were being written from that perspective. Even though they were writing to bring our country back together again, Jamestown was not seen as significant. It was not seen as a good starting point for our country. You want to pick something that has sort of a noble beginning. Escaping religious persecution – that’s a wonderful story isn’t it?

An assortment of beads found at the James Fort site used by the early settlers to trade with the Indians for food and other necessities. Courtesy APVA Preservation Virginia.

Whereas, our colony began as an economic venture, establishing a foothold for England in the New World and trying to make money off of that. It was dynamic, energetic, in many ways, goodwilled, it wasn’t all evil and starvation and death and killing. That’s sort of the view that people have and it’s just not true. It’s not true at all.

These are people like us. Many came looking for a better life, basically. And they found it here. Some did die, yes, that’s true. Some were less scrupulous than others and did bad things to other people like the Native Americans, that’s true. But look at us today, that’s human nature. But you can’t let the bad outweigh the good. That was the seed where our country started.

Q. You’ll have to tell me some of those things you have learned from the remains. It’s such a very important story and I know you haven’t yet written it.

That’s because we don’t have all the data yet. They are still being studied by our forensic anthropologists.

We are writing our text for the exhibit for the archaearium. And that’s going to be a big part of the archaerium. The story of the people.

Q. Of all the things you’ve found here, what have you made available for the public to see? Within the next year and a half what is available of the archaeological finds to see?

The large exhibition hall, the archaearium, is slated to open next spring.

Can you tell us about this word - archaearium? Is it something you have coined?

It’s supposed to mean a place of origin.

When we started thinking about what we should put in there and how it should be presented it was a question of how do we make it different from other people mounting exhibits for 2007 who are purchasing similar kinds of objects that we find. We don’t want to lose that whole thrust of this is the place, these are the real things that were broken, that were lost by these people that we’re studying. So we thought, o.k., let’s make it context-based. Let’s recreate some of the archaeological context that we found in the field and try to show the public how we found them, what they looked like and then how we interpreted these stains in the ground, these pits, these holes. Make sense of them and also show the actual objects that came out of there, which is part of that interpretation.

So one easy one to understand like that is the brick-lined well that we excavated.

And we’re going to reconstruct that shaft. So you’ll look up and see a figure of an archaeologist. It’s like you’re down in the well, in a way. You’ll see an archaeologist working and there will be a plexiglass window in through the shaft and you’ll see the artifacts suspended in the levels at which they were found within the well.

Then there will be interpretation. You can take it steps further if you want to know what things are, you can find out what things are. But you don’t have to. You can just look at it as a visual. It’s very artistic and beautiful.