JAMESTOWN, Va. — When his friends buried Capt. Gabriel Archer here about 1609, they dug his grave inside a church, lowered his coffin into the ground and placed a sealed silver box on the lid.
This English outpost was then a desperate place. The “starving time,” they called it. Dozens had died of hunger and disease. Survivors were walking skeletons, besieged by Indians and reduced to eating snakes, dogs and one another.
The tiny, hexagonal box, etched with the letter M, contained seven bone fragments and a small lead vial. It probably was an object of veneration, cherished as disaster closed in on the colony.
On Tuesday, more than 400 years after the mysterious box was buried, James town Rediscovery and the Smithsonian Institution announced that archaeologists have found it, as well as the graves of Archer and three other VIPs.
“It’s the most remarkable archaeology discovery of recent years,” said James Horn, president of Jamestown Rediscovery, which made the find. “It’s a huge deal.”
The discovery deepens the portrait of the first permanent English settlement in North America, established here in 1607, and raises intriguing questions about Jamestown’s first residents.
Where did the silver box come from? Are the bones inside it human, as they seem? If so, whose are they? And why was the box placed in Archer’s grave?
Horn said in an interview before the announcement that the box is a reliquary, a container for holy relics, such as the bones of a saint. “It’s a sacred object of great significance,” he said.
Such containers have a long tradition in the Catholic Church and predate the Protestant Reformation. So the appearance of one in post-Reformation Jamestown is mystifying.
Did it belong to Archer, whose Catholic parents had been “outlawed” for their faith back in England? Or to the fledgling Anglican Church, as a holdover from Catholicism?
“More research, more work” is required, Horn said. “Frankly, we need more help with interpreting this.”
Excavation begins
On a chilly November day in 2013, archaeologist Jamie May reached into the dirt of grave C, in what had been the chancel of the church, built inside the walls of James Fort in 1608.
With the thumb and forefinger of her left hand she gripped the little box, and with the other hand she gently worked it free with a small wooden tool.
As she lifted it out, director of archaeology William M. Kelso asked, “Does it feel hollow?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And it feels like there’s something in it.”
It had been three years since the Jamestown archaeologists had come across the huge post holes that outlined the long-vanished church, with the side-by-side graves inside. (The church, itself a historic find, was legendary as the place where the Indian princess Pocohontas married Englishman John Rolfe.)
Now, after months of research and preparation, the Jamestown team, and anthropologists from the Smithsonian, were excavating the burial sites.
Grave A contained the skeleton of the Rev. Robert Hunt, about 39, the first Anglican minister in the country, experts concluded from records and studies of the remains.
A devout peacemaker from Hampshire, in southern England, he had brought his library with him when he came over with the first colonists in 1607.
He may have left England, in part, because he suspected his wife was having an affair, according to records reviewed for the Smithsonian by .
But his books were destroyed in a fire that gutted the compound in 1608, and he died the same year.
Grave B held the skeleton of Sir Ferdinando Wainman, about 34, “an honest and valiant gentleman,” wrote a friend. He had died in 1610 and was buried in a fancy wooden coffin.
Although the coffin had disintegrated, its unusual shape, which included a “head box,” was determined by plotting the outline of the nails that survived.
The “anthropoid” coffin, which slightly resembles those of ancient Egypt, is “one of the few ever found in English America,” Horn said.
Wainman’s bones contained high levels of lead, indicating that he probably dined using pewter plates and goblets, a sign of high status, Horn said.
Grave C contained the remains of Archer, who was about 34 when he died. Although he stood only 5-foot-5, he was among the leading men who arrived in 1607. He was a lawyer and scribe, and his hands had been wounded in a skirmish with Indians.
Archer also had terrible teeth, with 14 cavities and two abscesses, said Douglas Owsley, the lead Smithsonian anthropologist, who studied the remains in the field and in the institution’s National Museum of Natural History.
Archer was buried in a coffin of white oak, and the silver box was found on top, near his lower left leg.
Grave D bore the remains of Capt. William West, who was about 24 and had been killed fighting Indians in 1610 near where Richmond is today. He also was buried in an anthropoid coffin, made by the same carpenter who made Wainman’s, Owsley said.
Remnants of a silk military sash, fringed with tiny, metal baubles, were found with his bones.
Owsley said he does not know how the men died but that “they died fast.”
The graves, inside the chancel, or altar area, of the timber-and-mud church, indicated that the occupants were esteemed members of the community.
Memorial planned
Kelso, the head archaeologist, said that for now the bones will be kept in a vault at the Jamestown complex, where they can be available for future study.
He said there are plans to build a memorial garden and mausoleum to hold all the remains recovered at Jamestown over the years.
The reliquary will go on periodic display, he said.
There are no plans to open it.
“It would likely damage the box,” he said. “And while I am far from a staunchly religious person … it seems to me that keeping it closed is somehow the right, respectful thing to do.”
