The big dig.(Jamestown: The Buried Truth)(Book review)

Jamestown: The Buried Truth, by William M. Kelso (Virginia, 256 pp., $29.95)

FOR a century and a half or more, the conventional wisdom held that the original fort at Jamestown, Virginia--site of the first permanent English settlement in the New World--had left no remnant. At some point in the irretrievable past, everyone agreed, the wooden palisades had slipped beneath the waters of the James River, a victim of erosion and of time.

The sole skeptic was an archeologist named William M. Kelso, who, as an undergraduate in 1963, visited Jamestown Island, where he noted the discovery of 17th-century artifacts under a Confederate earthwork. He also detected peculiar disturbances in the earthwork's soil. Might these disturbances, he wondered, be vestiges of the slots that once secured the fort's walls?

The question bedeviled Kelso until the spring of 1994, when, retained by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, he undertook his own excavations. Before long, Kelso's original "crew of one" had grown to a small squadron of archeologists whose work, at this writing, continues. In the "lowly trash" of the old settlement, they have found (so far) some 600,000 tools, weapons, pieces of china, buttons, and other objects of evidentiary importance. They also unearthed the skeletons of several dozen settlers and--perhaps you guessed--remnants of the original fort itself, on dry land.

In Buried Truth, Kelso tells the story of these discoveries, and a swell story it is. The physical evidence is as compelling, in many ways, as the documents that historians have relied on for two centuries. It is, in some cases, more revealing.

As befits an enterprise that set out to challenge received opinion, Kelso's work throws doubt on a number of durable Jamestown myths. It does so, to the author's credit, with none of the punitive spirit that too often inspires revisionists. The archeological record, in fact, suggests a more impressive accomplishment on the part of John Smith and the other settlers than heretofore believed. That they survived at all seems astonishing, if not providential.

They arrived in May 1607, in three ships sent by the Virginia Company of London, a group of entrepreneurs who hoped to people the Chesapeake with Englishmen, find gold, and discover a water route to the East Indies. From the moment the would-be colonists set sail, bitter and sometimes violent quarrels ensued. Captain Smith, accused of mutiny, spent much of the Atlantic crossing in chains. Once the ships landed and the settlers waded ashore and set up camp, the death rate was horrendous. Some fell in sporadic wars with the Algonquian Indians; many more starved.