Roanoke’s ‘Lost Colony’ Was Never Lost, New Book Says

Virginia Dare, the first Anglo child born in North America,
sustained herself on nuts, berries, and product endorsements.
(Virginia Dare Winery)

(NYTimes) In 1590, the would-be governor of a colony meant to be one of England’s first outposts in North America discovered that more than 100 settlers weren’t on the small island where he left them.
More than 400 years later, the question of what happened to those settlers, who landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of modern North Carolina, has grown into a piece of American mythology, inspiring plays, novels, documentaries and a tourism industry in the Outer Banks. Continued

Secrets of Duffy’s Cut Yield to Shovel and Science

 

(NYTimes) They laid his bones in a bed of Bubble Wrap, with a care beyond what is normally given to fragile things. They double-boxed those bones and carried them last month to the United Parcel Service office on Spruce Street in Philadelphia. Then they printed out the address and paid the fee.
With that, the remains of a young man were soon soaring over the Atlantic Ocean that he had crossed once in a three-masted ship. His name is believed to have been John Ruddy, and he was being returned to the Ireland he had left as a strapping teenage laborer in 1832.
His voyage home is the latest turn in the tale of Duffy’s Cut, a wooded patch that is little more than a sylvan blur to those aboard commuter trains rocketing past. It is a mass grave, in fact: the uneasy resting place for dozens of Irish immigrants who died during a cholera epidemic, just weeks after coming to America, as an old song says, to work upon the railway. Continued

Photo by smallbones 

 

Dr. Langley to Discuss War of 1812 Maritime Archaeology at Society on April 13

(WoCCP) Star-Spangled Archaeology: Commemorating the War of 1812 Through Maritime Archaeology, a recently added lecture, will wrap up the inaugural year of the Society’s Winter Speakers Series. Taking place on Saturday, April 13th at 2:00, the speaker, State Underwater Archaeologist Susan Langley, is sponsored by the Maryland Humanities Council and the Maryland War of 1812 Commission.
The waters of the Chesapeake conceal many hidden treasures, and Dr. Langley will help us dive into the subject of those submerged cultural resources. Continued

Friends of Camp Security need $400,000 by May

 

(YDR) Friends of Camp Security need to raise about $400,000 by May to help pay for a 47-acre property where historians believe a Revolutionary War prison camp once stood. The Conservation Fund bought the parcel off of Locust Grove Road in Springettsbury Township earlier this year from local developer Timothy Pasch, who had put the land up for sale. It ended a more than decade-long fight over whether the land would be preserved or become a housing development.
The total cost of the project came in around $1.05 million. Continued

In Small Things Forgotten

 

(NYTimes) The past survives all around us. The trick is recognizing it. Empty fields are usually empty fields, but sometimes they turn out to be former battlefields, slave villages or farms with dead buried along the palisade. As an archaeologist in Virginia, recognizing the past among the present is my job. And often, the past I uncover is related to the Civil War.
Many people are surprised to learn that archaeologists are interested in such relatively recent events; they think my job description focuses on Indian mounds and, perhaps, hidden treasure. The Civil War, in the popular mind, is the ultimate in thoroughly documented history, relegated to memorials and manicured battlefields, with little left to reveal, especially after relic hunters and development companies have worked over the land. It may seem that way, but it is not the case. Continued

Construction Site Offers Fleeting Glimpse of the Civil War Past

(NYTimes) ... FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — The first bullet surfaced just after lunch. As Jon Tucker sifted soil through a screen in September, a corroded lead slug jiggled into view amid the sand and ash excavated from a pit just a few feet from a fenced-off sidewalk and rushing traffic.
Mr. Tucker waved to his supervisor, Taft Kiser, the lead archaeologist on the site, and held up the bullet for him to see. It would not be the last time. Hundreds of artifacts followed, along with the contours of a buried cellar holding a rich trove of Civil War history sealed since a ferocious 1862 battle in this Virginia city, which today lies just beyond the suburbs of Washington. Continued

Searchers find no sign of Amelia Earhart's plane

(NBC/AP) A $2.2 million expedition that hoped to find wreckage from famed aviator Amelia Earhart's final flight is on its way back to Hawaii without the dramatic, conclusive plane images searchers were hoping to attain.
But the group leading the search, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, still believes Earhart and her navigator crashed onto a reef off a remote island in the Pacific Ocean 75 years ago this month, its president told The Associated Press on Monday.
"This is just sort of the way things are in this world," TIGHAR President Pat Thrasher said. "It's not like an Indiana Jones flick where you go through a door and there it is. It's not like that — it's never like that." Continued

Archaeologist Searh For War of 1812 Fort at Elk Landing

(WoCCP) Dozens of people from the Archeological Society of Maryland were at Elk Landing on this beautiful Sunday afternoon working to dig up new clues about Fort Hollingsworth and the pre-historic period at a strip of land located at the confluence of the Big and Little Elk creeks. The former farm and Chesapeake Bay port bustled with activity as professional and avocational investigators carefully scrapped, swept and sifted the soil with small trowels, brushes and other hand-tools looking for the smallest fragments of evidence that might shed light on the past. Continued

Credible Amelia Earhart radio signals were ignored as bogus

(Discovery) Dozens of previously dismissed radio signals were actually credible transmissions from Amelia Earhart, according to a new study of the alleged post-loss signals from Earhart's plane. The transmissions started riding the air waves just hours after Earhart sent her last in-flight message.
The study, presented on Friday at a three day conference by researchers of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), sheds new light on what may have happened to the legendary aviator 75 years ago. The researchers plan to start a high-tech underwater search for pieces of her aircraft next July. Continued

Conservation Fund negotiating with Pasch over Revolutionary War prison camp site

(York Daily Record) The Conservation Fund is negotiating with local developer Timothy Pasch to buy a 65-acre parcel where historians believe a Revolutionary War prison camp once stood, according to presentation made Wednesday.
"We are hoping for a very favorable result very shortly," Carol Tanzola, president of the Friends of Camp Security, told The Rotary Club of York Wednesday afternoon.
An archeological dig in 1979 uncovered between 10,000 and 15,000 artifacts - including pottery shards, buttons and gold coins - on the parcel off Locust Grove Road in Springettsbury Township, Tanzola said. Continued

Robert Hecht, Antiquities Dealer, Dies at 92

(NYTimes) Robert E. Hecht, an American expatriate antiquities dealer who skipped in and out of trouble for much of his career, weathering accusations that he trafficked in illicit artifacts, including a 2,500-year-old Greek vase that he sold for more than $1 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died on Wednesday at his home in Paris.
... Robert Emanuel Hecht Jr. (his wife was unsure whether his middle name was spelled with one m or two) was born in Baltimore on June 3, 1919, into the family that owned the Hecht chain of department stores. He graduated from Haverford College and served in the Navy during World War II. Fluent in German, he worked after the war as a civilian translator for the United States Army. Continued

Researchers unable to unearth mass grave at Duffy's Cut

MALVERN, Pa. (AP) The Irish immigrants building a stretch of railroad near Philadelphia in 1832 had been in the U.S. only a few weeks when they died — ostensibly of cholera — and were unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave. Their families never knew what happened to them.
Nearly 180 years later, local researchers say they have a clearer picture of the men's fate. Continued

'Summer kitchen' ruins found at Dill's Tavern

(YDR) After eight weeks of excavations and countless days spent cleaning artifacts surrounding the historic Dill's Tavern in Dillsburg [PA], ruins of a summer kitchen dating to the 1790s have been exposed.
Steve Warfel, a project leader for the archaeological dig and retired archaeologist from the State Museum of Pennsylvania, said the ruins were discovered last fall by a group of elementary school children.
Since then, a team of professionals and volunteers have continued exploring the site. Continued

History of the Great Dismal Swamp

(Wikipedia) Scientists believe the Great Dismal Swamp was created when the continental shelf made its last big shift. The swamp consists mainly of peat and water. The origin of Lake Drummond, one of only two natural lakes in Virginia, is not entirely clear. Native American legends tell of a giant "firebird" that made a nest of fire in the swamp; the nest later filled with rain.
There is archaeological evidence that 13,000 years ago, people lived in the swamp. In 1650, there were Native Americans in the Great Dismal Swamp, but white immigrants showed little interest. In 1665, William Drummond, the first governor of North Carolina, discovered the lake, which was subsequently named for him. In 1728, William Byrd II, while leading a land survey to establish a boundary between the Virginia and North Carolina colonies, made many observations of the swamp, none of them favorable. He is credited with naming it the Dismal Swamp.
In 1763, George Washington visited the area, and he and others founded the Dismal Swamp Company, a venture to drain the swamp and clear it for settlement. Later the company turned to the more profitable goal of timber harvesting. Continued

Bill could provide funding for Camp Security

(YDR) A bill introduced in Congress earlier this month could help save more land where historians believe a Revolutionary War prison camp once stood in Springettsbury Township.
The bill proposes $10 million annually for 10 years to acquire and protect nationally significant battlefields and associated sites of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
Camp Security, which is off Locust Grove Road, has been nationally recognized twice as one of the most historically significant and endangered sites. Continued

A cut above Duffy's

... A tulip poplar tree estimated at 130 feet, sitting above the remains of an Irish rail worker, was felled to allow researchers to get to the skeleton. The tree-felling was the latest event in the continuing work to discover the secrets of Duffy's Cut, the grave of as many as 57 trackworkers who died of cholera and possibly human hands in August 1832. Continued

Archaeology work being done at historic Dill's Tavern

(YDR) A couple of years ago, some second-graders digging to learn about archaeological work made a discovery at the historic Dill's Tavern in Dillsburg.
The students hit what appeared to be a foundation, and it ran underneath the tavern, said Sam McKinney, director of restoration at Dill's Tavern.
McKinney and a helper opened up the area a little more and found what appeared to be a fireplace. They stopped working and the Northern York County Historical and Preservation Society, which owns the tavern, hired a professional archaeologist to investigate. Continued

Photograph of Dill's Tavern courtesy of the Northern York County Historical and Preservation Society

After 90 Years, a Dictionary of an Ancient World

(NYTimes) Ninety years in the making, the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, unspoken for 2,000 years but preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions deciphered over the last two centuries, has finally been completed by scholars at the University of Chicago.
This was the language that Sargon the Great, king of Akkad in the 24th century B.C., spoke to command what is reputed to be the world’s first empire, and that Hammurabi used around 1700 B.C. to proclaim the first known code of laws. It was the vocabulary of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first masterpiece of world literature.
Nebuchadnezzar II presumably called on these words to soothe his wife, homesick for her native land, with the promise of cultivating the wondrous Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Continued

Celebration set for preservation of farm that might include Camp Security

(YDR) A celebration for the preservation of a farm where historians believe a Revolutionary War prison camp once stood will be held Wednesday in Springettsbury Township.
The Conservation Fund bought the 116-acre Rowe farm off Locust Grove Road in Springettsbury Township. The property was transferred to the township late last week, township supervisor Bill Schenck said Monday.
The farm surrounds the Schultz House, owned by Historic York, and is adjacent to a parcel owned by developer Tim Pasch. Historians believe part of Camp Security lies on Pasch's property as well, and his plans to build houses on it has sparked controversy. A limited archeological dig in 1979 revealed artifacts, such as pottery shards, buttons and gold coins. Continued

Nantucket Whaler Lost in Pacific Tells Its Tale at Last

(NYTimes) In the annals of the sea, there were few sailors whose luck was worse than George Pollard Jr.’s. Pollard, you see, was the captain of the Essex, the doomed Nantucket whaler whose demise, in 1820, came in a most unbelievable fashion: it was attacked and sunk by an angry sperm whale, an event that inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby-Dick.”
Unlike the tale of Ahab and Ishmael, however, Pollard’s story didn’t end there: After the Essex sank, Pollard and his crew floated through the Pacific for three months, a journey punctuated by death, starvation, madness and, in the end, cannibalism. (Pollard, alas, ate his cousin.) Continued