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Excavations at Jamestown, Virginia. Site of the First Permanent English Settlement in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

John L. Cotter
John L. Cotter*
Affiliation:
National Park Service
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Extract

On a bit of marsh-mound land cast up in the James River was planted the first permanent English settlement in America. The landing at Jamestown, 13 May (o.s.), 1607, did not represent the first attempt to found an English colony on the eastern seaboard. In 1585 an expedition under the command of Sir Richard Grenville and with Ralph Lane as Lieutenant-Governor established the ill-fated Roanoke Island colony off the coast of North Carolina. By 1590 it had vanished—to this day the fate of the ‘Lost Colony’ is uncertain.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 31 , Issue 121 , March 1957 , pp. 19 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1957

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References

1 This is not to minimize the importance of useful preliminary observations and source materials for future studies of Jamestown, such as the Bibliography of Virginia (Richmond, Va., 1916) and Virginia Historical Index (Roanoke, Va., 1934–36), by Earl G. Swem; The Site of Old “James Towne” 1607–1698 (Richmond, Va., 1930), by Samuel H. Yonge; and the painstaking studies of architectural beginnings at Jamestown by Henry Chandlee Forman: Jamestown and St Mary’s (Baltimore, Me., 1938) and The Architecture of The Old South (Cambridge, Mass., 1948). Over a period of more than twenty years National Park Service historians and archaeologists have produced several general and topical booklets devoted to interpreting Jamestown for the visiting public, together with a number of special studies and reports, a few of which have been published in professional quarterlies and trade magazines the remainder being on file at Colonial National Historical Park, Yorktown, Virginia.