Word: fortes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Truth), in 19 days and in a June swelter they cut and split more than 600 trees weighing 400 to 800 lbs. each and set them in a triangular trench three football fields long and 2 1/2 ft. deep. In 2004 New Line Cinema built a replica of the fort for its film The New World and did it in about the same amount of time--with power tools...
When archaeologists first started digging in Jamestown in the 1930s, they turned up more than half a million artifacts--but not a trace of the original fort. In fact, nobody expected to find it. Based on a handful of written eyewitness accounts and two maps, the James Fort was widely believed to have been built at the west end of Jamestown Island, close to the deepwater channel where the colonists presumably moored their ships. The river had washed away some 25 acres of that part of the island long ago, however, and most archaeologists figured the site of the fort...
William Kelso disagreed. Unlike his colleagues, Kelso, a specialist in colonial American archaeology who began working for the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities in 1993, was convinced that the fort lay instead somewhere close to the brick church tower built in 1690, the only surviving structure from the colony's first century. So on April 4, 1994, he put his shovel in the ground, and less than an hour later turned up fragments of early 17th century ceramics. Over the next few months, Kelso and a team of volunteers uncovered a series of circular stains in the soil...
Although it took him another 10 years of slow, patient work, Kelso eventually managed to map out the triangle shape of the fort along with the foundations of at least five buildings, several wells and a burial ground. His team has also dug up more than a million artifacts, about twice the number found over the previous half-century, including arms and armor, pottery, clay pipes, clothing and shoes, iron tools, jewelry, animal bones, trade beads, sheets of copper and hundreds of stone points. Individually, these objects seem trivial. Taken together, however, they're yielding an extraordinary picture...
Perhaps the most unexpected discovery is evidence that Indians, whom the settlers assumed would be uniformly hostile, actually lived in the fort for some period of time. Trash pits, for example, yielded fragments of an Indian reed mat as well as shell beads favored by the Indians and the type of stone tool that they would have used to drill them. The Indian artifacts were found mixed in with English ones in an undisturbed layer of soil and in greater concentrations than have ever been found in Virginia Indian villages. That, and the fact that the Indians bothered to carry...