In the Top 10 for 2010!!!!

Working on the center posthole of the 1608 church's east wall.

So, it's been a while, but this is news worth sharing. First, analysis is still being done on artifacts from the John Smith well. Some really exciting things have been found, including these personalized pipes!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/31/AR2010123101033.html

This article from Yahoo News has a better picture of the pipes in question:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101231/ap_on_re_us/us_jamestown_tobacco_pipes

Equally exciting is this article:

http://articles.dailypress.com/2010-12-31/news/dp-nws-jamestownchurch-evg-20101231_1_jamestown-rediscovery-project-jamestown-church-william-m-kelso

Archaeology magazine has voted the find of the 1608 church as one of the Top 10 archaeological finds of 2010! That puts it right up there with ancient pyramids in Peru, 4th-century royal Mayan tombs, and a 3.6-million-year-old skeleton from an early hominid in Ethiopia. Pretty exclusive list!

My favorite line of the article is this:

"The first clues to its [the church's] survival appeared in early summer when students from the project's field school discovered a pair of unusually large rectangular stains hidden beneath a deep layer of modern fill near the fort's center."

"Valerie's feature" as we found it in the first week of excavations.

Remember the feature Danny jokingly called "Valerie's feature"? That was the more southerly of the two "unusually large rectangular stains" - and I love that they mention the field school in the article. As I mentioned before, it was so exciting to help put something on the map at Jamestown, and it was an honor to work with and learn from the talented staff at Jamestown Rediscovery. At last count, their continuing excavations had uncovered nine postholes of the (presumed) fourteen that would make up the church's footprint. (Check out "The Dig" at http://www.historicjamestowne.org/ for more information!)

The nine church postholes appear marked in the center purple polyhedron on the map.
(Image respectfully borrowed from the Historic Jamestowne website at http://www.historicjamestowne.org/.)

In less exciting news, a personal update - I am off to the annual conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Austin this coming week. Steve's sister and her family live in Austin, so we will stay with them. The girls and Steve will be able to visit whilst I'm off being all archaeological. :) It will be a fun start to the new year (although going back to our respective schools after the 16+ hour drive home will be a bit of a challenge!

I'm happy to report I made straight As in classes this semester (well, ecstatic, acutally!) and my research paper about the women of James Fort was well-received by my professors. So well received, in fact, that one prof suggested I expand on it for my thesis, while another put me in touch with one of Colonial Williamsburg's historians as a resource for my research. Not only was he interested in my proposed research, he suggested I might want to apply to their fellowship program for the summer! Very exciting! I'm beginning to feel like I might really be good at this archaeology stuff!

Needless to say, 2010 was a very good year. I hope 2011 will be even better!