SUBMARINES AND SETTLERS; GOLD COINS AND LEAD BULLETS
IN 1995 A CONFEDERATE SUBMARINE CALLED THE H. L. HUNLEY was discovered just off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. One hundred thirty years earlier, during the Civil War in February 1864, the Hunley had become the first submarine anywhere to sink an enemy ship in battle. The target ship was the USS Housatonic. The Hunley didn’t so much fire its torpedo, but rather rammed the Housatonic, piercing its side with the torpedo’s sixteen-foot-long metal spar—like a long harpoon—at the front of the sub.
The torpedo was left stuck inside the ship, as designed. It was long thought that the crew then backed off about 150 feet before detonating the torpedo via a rope that pulled a trigger on the attached torpedo. Recent evidence, however, indicates that they may have had difficulty detaching from the Housatonic and were only about twenty feet away when the torpedo exploded, so the Hunley may have been destroyed in the same detonation. The Confederates also may not have figured on the concussion shock wave caused by the detonation, or else the detonation may have knocked a latch on the forward conning tower loose, since it was found unsecured. In any case, when the torpedo went off, the Housatonic promptly sank off Sullivan’s Island near Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, but so did the Hunley, in thirty feet of water and with all eight men still on board. The sub had already sunk twice before, with both crews lost, while practicing for the attack, but this time it was lost for good, at least until 1995.
The excavation of the Hunley is a good example of historical archaeology, which is what archaeologists call archaeological work related to events in the modern world since 1500. In most cases there are historical records of these same events. Archaeologists provide a different lens on these incidents, enriching and often contradicting the written records. In the case of the Hunley, when the conservation and excavation of the submarine is complete, archaeology may help solve the mystery of why the Hunley sank and provide much more information on its construction and operation and a wealth of knowledge about the crew members, little of which was recorded in written records.
The Hunley also is a good example of an excavation that was conducted under the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987, which was signed into law in 1988. The act is meant to stop the looting of shipwrecks that sank in either state or federal waters, whether in Lake Michigan, the Potomac River, or off the coast of Florida. It gives authority to the federal government and to the state in which the wreck was found. Thus, the Hunley is in the jurisdiction of South Carolina, because the submarine was discovered seven years after the act was signed into law and wasn’t raised for another five years after that, in 2000. Credit for finding the sub is usually given to the novelist Clive Cussler and his team.
South Carolina established the Hunley Commission, which serves as the custodian, meaning that it negotiates the details about its recovery, curation, and exhibition. Today, the original submarine is on display in North Charleston, where it is kept in a ninety-thousand-gallon tank of freshwater to help remove salt that has permeated the small spaces between the metal components of the vessel and to prevent additional corrosion.
The forty-foot-long sub was found on its side, at a 45-degree angle, sunken into the silt of the sea floor, thirty feet below the water surface. According to Dave Conlin, the archaeological field director, analysis of the sediments covering the Hunley showed that natural processes probably buried it within thirty years of sinking. Raising it involved a lot of people and a neat feat of engineering requiring a hammock of straps below the submarine that was attached to a hoist to bring it to the surface. Once it was safely in the freshwater tank in the laboratory, excavation inside the vessel began almost immediately. The first human remains—three ribs—were found soon after, as were scraps of textile, part of a belt, and a corked glass bottle. The matrix of silt had protected the remains from the currents and the seawater, and the relative lack of oxygen had preserved skeletal material from the bodies as well as other artifacts.
Excavation and investigation of the Hunley has continued ever since. By now, the complete skeletons and skulls of all eight men have been recovered. Every one of them was found still sitting at his post, meaning that death might have been fairly instantaneous, or that they might have become incapacitated and drowned in place.
One of the crew members—Joseph Ridgaway of Talbot County, Maryland—has been positively identified through a DNA match made in 2004. Another, the commander, Lieutenant George E. Dixon, also has been identified, though more circumstantially. Dixon was known to have kept an engraved twenty-dollar gold coin with him at all times as a good-luck charm. A young girl had given it to him—some reports say it was his fiancée. It had saved his life earlier, when he had been shot at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee and the bullet hit the coin instead of killing Dixon.
The archaeologists excavating the Hunley found such a coin, with a deep indentation from a bullet and inscribed with the words “Shiloh; April 6, 1862; My life preserver. G.E.D.,” near the remains of a crewman. Later they found that the skeleton of that same crew member had a healed bullet wound in the left upper thigh, with pieces of lead and flecks of gold still embedded in his femur. These were most likely from the bullet and the coin, respectively, and it’s pretty clear that this must be Dixon’s body. They also found his pocket watch, as well as a wallet, a bandana, matches, and tobacco pipes. The remains of Ridgaway, Dixon, and the other crew members were ceremoniously buried in Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston in 2004. As Conlin has noted, the recovery of the Hunley “represents a model of federal, state, and private sector united in service to an archaeological resource of extraordinary importance.”
UNESCO has now also begun efforts to protect underwater finds around the world by passing the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage in 2009. The convention came into play in an interesting way two years later, when the Smithsonian was planning an exhibit that would have displayed objects from an Arab wreck that sank in the Java Sea in the ninth century CE.
The shipwreck contained priceless artifacts from the Chinese Tang dynasty but was not excavated by professional archaeologists. Rather, the artifacts were recovered by a private company and later sold to another company for a reported $32 million. Three different archaeological associations, as well as several members of the Smithsonian’s own internal research unit, protested the proposed exhibition, saying that the process by which the artifacts had been recovered was closer to looting than to proper archaeological excavation. In the end, in the face of the protests, the exhibit was first postponed and then finally simply canceled before it ever even opened.
If we now move up the East Coast from South Carolina, we come to the excavations at Jamestown, Virginia. These excavations have been under the direction of William Kelso since the 1990s. They are an excellent example of traditional excavation methodology now enhanced by cutting-edge technology.
Jamestown was the first permanent settlement to be established by British colonists, in what would later become the Commonwealth of Virginia. About one hundred men, who had a very rough time during the first few years, began the settlement in 1607. Reinforcements, including some women, arrived a few years later. It is probably most well known to people today because of Pocahontas, the Native American woman who reportedly saved the life of Captain John Smith and then married a colonist named John Rolfe. The events are usually pitched as an improbable love story in the face of overwhelming odds, the Disney movie of the same name being one example. When Rolfe later returned to England for a visit, along with a new strain of tobacco that he had developed, he brought Pocahontas with him. The visit had a sad result, for she died while they were in England.
The site of Jamestown had pretty much vanished over the centuries. Before Kelso began his excavations, he had only a little information to work with, mostly gleaned from archives stored in a library. It is the writings of Captain Smith and others—that is, eyewitness accounts—as well as a small sketch of the site by a Spanish spy and a single church tower, made of brick and dating from a later period, that led Kelso to determine where to place the first trenches. His archaeological intuition was excellent, and within hours of beginning their excavations, his team had found the first artifacts and remains of buildings.
What did they find? Right away they came up with weapons and armor, as well as pottery, glass, coins, and other artifacts dating to the seventeenth century. They also found a line of postholes, which was all that remained of the wooden protective palisade wall belonging to the original fort. The wooden posts had long since disintegrated, but the holes in the ground dug to hold the posts were still plainly visible.
As the excavations continued over the years, they found the rest of the outline of the whole fort, as well as the remains of five additional buildings, including the church, the governor’s house, the barracks, and a workshop or trading post (which Kelso has also called a factory). By 2007, when Kelso published a brief description of their findings, they also had found numerous graves and skeletons in a variety of places, more than seventy of the interments in a cemetery, and also single graves underneath the church. The skeletal remains indicated that the men had mostly died before the age of twenty-five. The women didn’t live much longer than that.
It was four skeletons in particular, though, that caught Kelso’s interest. The four bodies had been found in November 2013, in the area of the church where Pocahontas and John Rolfe were married, which Kelso’s team had uncovered earlier. The skeletal material was not well preserved, and so the effort to identify them involved the use of chemical testing and high-resolution micro-CT scanning. By late July 2015, the media reported—rather breathlessly—that the remains had been positively identified as belonging to some of the early leaders of the colony.
According to some of those media reports, the skeletons had been taken to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where biological anthropologist Doug Owsley worked on them. Owsley, who also teaches classes to some of our George Washington University students, is world famous and has worked on many such cases, including the skeletons from the Hunley that we just discussed. Owsley and his team were able to identify the Jamestown skeletons using a combination of forensic analysis and historical records.
The historical records allowed them to determine who had died between January 1608, when the church was constructed, and 1617, when it fell into disrepair and was moved. This narrowed down the list of possible suspects. The forensic analysis gave them the approximate age at death and the gender for the remains of the four skeletons.
They also did chemical testing to determine the diet and such things as the level of lead in the bones. The results indicated that the dead people were most likely English and of high status, because of their high-protein diet and their exposure to things like pewter bowls and glazed pottery, both of which contain lead. Their high status, or at least their importance in the colony, also was indicated by the fact that their graves were found under the chancel of the church—that is, the space around the altar at the eastern end of the church—rather than in the unmarked cemetery located elsewhere.
All four were men. Two were from the original group of immigrants that arrived in 1607. They were Captain Gabriel Archer, who went looking for gold and silver in the hinterland of the settlement before his death at about the age of thirty-five in 1609 or 1610, and Reverend Robert Hunt, the first chaplain of the settlement, who died at the age of thirty-nine after less than a full year at Jamestown. The other two were from the group of reinforcements who arrived in 1610. These are Ferdinando Wainman, who was around thirty-four years old when he died, reportedly of disease, just a few months after arriving, and his relative, Captain William West, who was killed by the Native Americans in 1610, also just a few months after arriving, when he was only about twenty-five years old.
Kelso and his team also uncovered some human bones in 2012 that they thought were unusual and merited further investigation. The bones included fragments from a mutilated and incomplete skull, teeth and the lower jaw, and a severed leg bone—a tibia, to be precise. Kelso found them in the cellar of a Jamestown house, in a context with the discarded bones of butchered horses and dogs, which is a rather unusual and unexpected location, to say the least. He called in Owsley to look at the remains.
Owsley identified the bones as belonging to a young woman, specifically a young English girl about fourteen years old, based on the development of her third molar and the growth stage of her shinbone. They nicknamed her Jane. Although they couldn’t determine her identity or her cause of death, because there were so few bones, Owsley and his associates noticed that the bones exhibited unusual cut marks. There were four shallow cuts on her forehead, which the forensic anthropologists identified as an initial attempt to crack open her skull, according to the Smithsonian Insider online newsletter. The back of her head was then hit with a hatchet or a cleaver, in a series of blows. The last one split her head open, presumably providing access to her brain.
They also noticed that the lower jaw, or mandible, had punctures and sharp cuts on its bottom and sides. These, they said, were the result of “efforts to remove tissue from the face and throat using a knife.”
From this evidence, Owsley, Kelso, and others have concluded that Jane died during the so-called “Starving Time”—the bleak winter months of 1609–1610 when the colony was ravaged by hunger and disease and almost failed before the reinforcements arrived. They also think that the other colonists ate her after she died. The evidence shows that the colonists were desperate enough at that time to resort to cannibalism.
The forensic scientists also created a reconstruction of her head, using CT scans and other technology. The reconstruction was on display for a while at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, and the original skeletal remains are presented at Historic Jamestowne, the educational tourist center operated by the Jamestown Rediscovery project on Jamestown Island.
Doug Owsley provides us with a nice connection that takes us from the East Coast all the way across North America to Washington State. That’s because Owsley was also responsible for examining the almost-nine-thousand-year-old skeleton of what is known as Kennewick Man to archaeologists and as the Ancient One to the local Native American tribes. The skeleton has been the subject of a great deal of debate since its discovery in 1996, near Kennewick, Washington, by the banks of the Columbia River. In particular, the discovery of Kennewick Man has stoked the controversy that has always surrounded the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), which is perhaps the best-known piece of US legislation that has involved archaeology in the past several decades.
NAGPRA requires every federally funded US museum and similar institution to provide an inventory of all their Native American artifacts, including human remains, funerary objects, grave goods, and so on. Each institution with such artifacts or remains had to determine whether any living Native American tribes could claim a relationship with the inventoried objects. If so, then the institution was required to offer to repatriate to the tribe whatever it was.
These included things like Ishi’s brain, which belonged to the last known Native American still living in the wilds of California. Ishi, a member of the Yahi tribe, had emerged from hiding in 1911 and was an instant media sensation. Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber is perhaps best known for his work with Ishi, and Alfred’s wife Theodora, also an anthropologist, published a very popular book about him, Ishi in Two Worlds.
Ishi also had a lot of interaction with a doctor named Saxton Pope, who was at University of California–San Francisco. Pope was an avid bow hunter. He befriended Ishi, who taught Pope how he made bows and arrows. Pope subsequently wrote and published a book in 1923, entitled Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, which is still highly regarded today.
After Ishi’s death in 1916, his brain was sent to the Smithsonian warehouse in Suitland, Maryland, where it was kept in a sealed tank. When NAGPRA was passed in 1990, Ishi’s brain was repatriated and reunited with his cremated remains in California.
NAGPRA also came to the forefront when Kennewick Man was found in the Columbia River, reportedly by two college students who were wading in the river while watching boat races in late July 1996. The initial discovery was part of his skull, which was found about ten feet from shore. At first it was thought he might have been a murder victim, and so the coroner and a local archaeologist named James Chatters searched for more parts, quickly turning up almost his entire skeleton. It eventually was discovered that he died about eighty-five hundred years ago.
Kennewick Man has been the subject of litigation almost since the moment he was found, with Native American groups arguing that he was Native American and should be repatriated to them, and a number of prominent scholars arguing that he was not Native American, because the remains were too old to be related to any of the current tribes and should be cared for by the federal government because his remains were found on federal land. The case was settled in 2002 and affirmed by an appeals court in 2004, in favor of the scholars. The bones were kept in the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, in Seattle, Washington, during the decade-long legal dispute between a group of eight archaeologists, five Native American tribes, and the federal government. They are not on display but were made available for study by scholars after the court decision.
The case is still being debated. Most recently, in 2015, geneticists from the University of Copenhagen and elsewhere published an article in Nature, which compared the DNA of Kennewick Man to that of members from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and concluded that he is more closely related to modern Native Americans than he is to anyone else. On the basis of that publication, and a subsequent independent validation of those findings by scientists at the University of Chicago, it was decided in late April 2016 that Kennewick Man was to be repatriated and eventually buried by a coalition of five Native American tribal bands, including the Colville.
If we move from the Pacific Northwest to the American Southwest, we find breathtaking Native American sites like Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The canyon is a National Historical Park near Albuquerque that was named a UNESCO Heritage site in 1987. It has amazing ruins built there by the Ancestral Pueblo people, which date to between 850 and 1250 CE.
At Chaco Canyon are a number of what are referred to as great houses—huge structures with multiple rooms and multiple stories. One of the best examples is Pueblo Bonito, which had between six hundred and eight hundred rooms and was five stories tall. It was built in stages between 850 and 1150 CE. It covers three acres, but scholars are uncertain how many people lived there—estimates range from about eight hundred to several thousand. It is also not completely clear whether it was a ritual center or a thriving village.
The Chacoan culture, as it is now called, covered portions of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. Imported goods that have been found there, including seashells and copper bells, attest to trade with areas as far away as Mexico. It is unclear, however, why Chacoan culture disappeared by about 1200 CE, although drought and plague, possibly followed by migration, have been suggested.
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
Other ruins can be seen at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. Within the park are nearly five thousand individual sites that date between the sixth and thirteenth centuries CE. There are about six hundred cliff dwellings there, which run the gamut from small storage rooms to impressively large villages with as many as 150 rooms. The ruins at Mesa Verde, which include the famous Cliff Palace, Long House, Spruce Tree House, and Balcony House, were named a UNESCO Heritage site in 1978.
Elsewhere, in the Midwest, about ten miles northeast of St. Louis, Missouri, Cahokia Mounds is another UNESCO Heritage site, as of 1982. Built by members of the Mississippian culture between 800 and 1400 CE, and with a population of as many as twenty thousand inhabitants at its peak in about 1100 CE, the site consists of about 120 separate mounds; hence the colloquial name for those who lived here—the Mound Builders. Covering at least two thousand acres, and described as being larger than London was at the time, it is considered to be the largest pre-Columbian archaeological site in the United States.
The biggest of the mounds, known as Monks Mound, is almost one hundred feet tall. It has been estimated that it took 22 million cubic feet of soil to create it. It covers six acres, making it slightly larger than the Pyramid of the Sun by the Moche capital city in Peru and therefore entitled to be dubbed “the largest prehistoric earthen structure in the New World,” as it is called on the relevant UNESCO web page. Most of the mounds are much smaller and were originally meant as platforms and foundations for public buildings, as well as for tombs, but still, the early European explorers and settlers could not believe that the local inhabitants built them. The first published report, by Henry Brackenridge in 1811, compared the mounds to the pyramids of Egypt and, just as with the Maya before John Lloyd Stephens’s publications, it was thought that foreigners, including possibly Phoenicians or Vikings, if not Egyptians or lost Israelites, must have built them.
It is indeed impressive to consider what must have gone into the building of these mounds and the complex society that they represent. The mounds, of various sizes and shapes, are enduring reminders of a civilization that once stretched across the Mississippi Valley and the southeastern United States. If we had detailed written records left to us by the members of this society, as we do for the Maya and other New World civilizations, we would undoubtedly be even more impressed by the Native American inhabitants responsible for these remains.
There are also, of course, any number of other North American archaeological sites to visit, including Colonial Williamsburg and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, both of which recreate the time period using re-enactors and are aimed at informing the interested visitor. Both also occasionally welcome volunteers to help excavate at the sites.
For those who want to actually participate in a formal excavation in the United States, there are plenty of opportunities. It is relatively easy to learn what’s going on and to find a project on which one can volunteer. For instance, there is Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, near Mesa Verde National Park. There it is possible to participate in a number of archaeological programs, whether solo or with the entire family. A similar, well-established program exists at the Center for American Archaeology in Kampsville, Illinois. A variety of other excavations welcome volunteers as participants; most are listed in the Archaeological Fieldwork Opportunity Bulletin that is published online every year by the Archaeological Institute of America on its website.
In any case, the wonderful diversity of the archaeological landscape of North America is clear, even just from our brief survey in this chapter, where our discussion has included a sunken submarine in South Carolina and a lost settlement in Virginia, brief mentions of the ruins in the American Southwest, finds in the Pacific Northwest, and mounds in the Midwest. No matter where on the continent one happens to be, there’s something interesting buried in the dirt.