I'd like to chime in a little bit late (busy, busy, busy) on the subject
of how much different the history of the first years at Jamestown looks
now from how it looked once upon a time when I was first reading about
American history and Virginia history.

As Jon Kukla pointed out the other day, Bill Kelso's book about his
archaeological excavations of the original fort site and Jim Horn's book
_A Land as God Made It_ (as well as some other excellent new scholarly
narratives) have made all of us go back and look at the original
documentary evidence again and reassess what it reveals. (Both are also
very well written and enjoyable to read.)

In the best traditions of scholarly inquiry, new questions produce new
insights, which in turn produce new questions; and the same is true of
new evidence, which the archaeology produced.

The once-popular interpretation of the settlers as poorly organized and
poorly supplied and over-equipped with lazy gentlemen who would not work
is no long entirely tenable. The commanders certainly quarreled with one
another and made a pig's breakfast out of some aspects of the
enterprise, but we know now that it was to be organized and run as a
military expedition, meaning that they planned to buy or steal their
foodstuffs from the Indians, not subsist off of agriculture; that they
were initially much more worried about Spanish intruders than about
Indian uprisings (hence the design of the fort and the placement of the
cannon). Moreover, we also know that a very severe drought began just
before the English landed, making survival of the Indians difficult and
making it impossible for the English to live off their surplus.
Relations between the Indians and the English, therefore, probably
operated differently than we once thought by approaching the old written
evidence with the old preconceptions about the management of the
settlement directing our gaze and in turn influencing the questions we
asked when we read the old evidence.

All these and many other new bits of information or insights lead to the
reevaluation of the evidence that we already had, which in turn leads to
a reinterpretation of the entire enterprise and a new historical
narrative.

This is what's fun about studying history. It's about learning and
thinking, not about mythology or hero-worship (although there never were
very many heroes in the Jamestown narrative).

$0.02 worth (which ain't much any more) from

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at
http://www.lva.virginia.gov

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