Word: virginias
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Harvard creative writing teachers this week continued to grapple with the implications of the shootings at Virginia Tech—which were perpetrated by an English major whose disturbed mind first became known to university officials through the creative writing classroom...
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...
...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 tools like the stone drills into the fort, has led archaeologists to think the Indians spent significant amounts of time there. "It must have been a very close relationship," says Kelso. "No one really talks about that...
...colonists were ill-prepared for life in Virginia and, at least initially, had no crops to harvest. So Kelso was not surprised to dig up the goods they offered the Indians in exchange for food. Among them: Venetian glass beads (blue ones were preferred), sheet copper (a commodity prized by the Powhatan, who wore pendants and other ornaments fashioned from the reddish metal), European coins (useless in Virginia) and metal tools (the Indians had ones made only from stone, wood, bone and shell). By the 1660s, when the English had established a number of settlements in the area, the Indians...
...Virginia Tech students return to class...