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Historic Jamestowne is the official name given to the site of Jamestown, Virginia, England’s first permanent New World colony. Jointly administered by the National Park Service and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation on behalf of Preservation Virginia, Historic Jamestown is located approximately 45 km inland from the Chesapeake Bay on the James River and was settled by the English in 1607. Jamestown served as the capital of Virginia until 1699, when the seat of government moved to nearby Williamsburg. Jamestown has been the site of archaeological excavations since the 1890s and therefore holds a significant place in the development of historical archaeology. Presentation of the site is facilitated through a series of indoor and outdoor exhibits and ongoing archaeological excavations.
In 1994, archaeologists working on the 22.5 acre property owned by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (now Preservation Virginia) discovered traces of the fort...
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Blanton, D.B., P. Kandle & C. Downing. 2000. Archaeological survey of Jamestown Island. Williamsburg (VA): Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Brown, M.R. III & A. Horning. 2006. Jamestown Island: a comprehensive analysis of the Jamestown archaeological assessment, 1992-1996. Williamsburg (VA): Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Carson, C., J. Bowen, W. Graham, M. Mccartney & L. Walsh. 2008. New world, real world: improvising English culture in seventeenth-century Virginia. Journal of Southern History 74: 32-88.
Carson, C., A. Horning & B. Straube. 2006. Evaluation of previous archaeology. Williamsburg (VA): Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Cotter, J.L. 1958. Archaeological excavations at Jamestown, Virginia (National Park Service Archaeological Research Series 4). Washington (DC): Government Printing Office.
Horning, A. 2000. Urbanism in the colonial south: the development of seventeenth-century Jamestown, in A. Young (ed.) Archaeology of southern urban landscapes: 52-68. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
- 1995. ‘A verie fit plae to erect a great cittie’: comparative contextual analysis of archaeological Jamestown. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Kelso, W. 2007. Jamestown: the buried truth. Charlottesville (VA): University of Virginia Press.
Kelso, W. & B. Straube. (ed.) 2008. 2000-2006 Interim report on the excavations at Jamestown, Virginia. Unpublished report by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. Williamsburg, Virginia.
Stahle, D.W., M.K. Cleaveland, D.B. Blanton, M.D. Therron & D.A. Gray. 1998. The lost colony and Jamestown droughts. Science 280: 564-7.
Straube, B. 2007. The Archaearium: rediscovering Jamestown 1607-1699. Richmond: Preservation Virginia.
Further Reading
Kelso, W. (ed.) 2010. Archaeology of early European colonial settlement in the emerging Atlantic world (Society for Historical Archaeology Special Publication series 8). Rockville (MD): Society for Historical Archaeology.
Kupperman, K. 2007. The Jamestown Project. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
Mallios, S. 2006. The deadly politics of giving: exchange and violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Straube, B. 2006. ‘Unfitt for any moderne service’? Arms and armour from James Fort. Post-Medieval Archaeology 40: 33-61.
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Horning, A. (2014). Historic Jamestowne. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1620
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