Exploring Martin's Hundred.(Review)

Martin's Hundred, on the north bank of the James River six miles from Williamsburg, Virginia was colonized in 1619 by some 220 English emigrants who disembarked from the ship Gift of God, An Indian raid in 1622 left about half of them dead or kidnapped and the settlement decimated. Seven years of careful excavations by the archaeologists of Colonial Williamsburg backed by the National Geographic Society have resulted in the present analysis of colony and colonists by Ivor Noel Hume and his late wife, Audrey, both archaeologists at Colonial Williamsburg. The book is dedicated to Nathaniel Smith, known as Nate, who is identified as "Foreman and Friend" He supervised the diggers, without whom there would have been no book

Around 1617 the Society of Martin's Hundred in London gained title to twenty thousand acres in Virginia, hoping to turn a profit for the subscribers, whose "promotional namesake" was one Martin Of three plausible Martins, Sir Richard Martin (1534-1617) is the most likely candidate. As master of the mint in London he "smelled of money and would have given the new Company the appearance of rocklike solidity." As for the "Hundred," there is oddly enough no dictionary definition of the word in this context The author opts for equating the colony with an English shire and defining "Hundred" as "a semi-autonomous subdivision of large but unspecified dimensions," which may, or may not, be better than no definition at all.

After the introductory summary of the genesis and demise of Martin's Hundred, chapters are devoted to the colonists, "where they lived worked, fenced, and sometimes hid," their arms and armor, pots, glass, tobacco pipes, "the small finds," and "the pits." Introducing the section on the colonists, the author writes in a char acteristically refreshing manner "Most studies in historical archaeology follow the introductory history by a description of the excavation and, in particular, the methodology employed. This can produce an effect akin to the boredom created by a fisherman who describes his bolt, his hook, his line, and his sinker before getting to the size of his catch. It is enough at this point to assert that in the areas opened up no sod was left unturned no posthole unexcavated. In this extensive process of clearance 40 graves were encountered and all of them opened. The trick was to tie correct name tags to the toes of their occupants."

Forensic pathology is one of the perks of the historical archaeologist, and certainly one that the author relishes. Examples of his sleuthing are irresistible. One of the better preserved skeletons remaining from the Indian attack lay on its back exhibiting a vertical gash immediately to the right of the nose and above the right eye socket" The author eliminates a sword and an Indian stone ax as the murder weapon, and finds that the blow was dealt by the "corner of an iron-shod spade." A footnote cites a modem English murder investigation for confirmation of the spade, and there is a photograph of a period spade blade buried in the skull to show how well it fits. The murder weapon is in line with a contemporary description of the massacre, which has the Indians coming peaceably to the settlement, some even eating breakfast with the colonists, and then killing them with "their owne tooles and weapons." When the skull bashed with the spade was turned over, it "was found to have been hit from behind and broken into poker-chip-sized fragments" ...