Excavating Fort Raleigh: Archaeology at England s First Colony

Dig into a first-hand account of excavations at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. A small earthen fort on Roanoke Island, traditionally known as Old Fort Raleigh, was the site of the first English colony in the Americas. Previous archaeological discoveries at the site left many questions unanswered by the 1990s. Where was the main fort and town founded by Raleigh’s lieutenant, Ralph Lane, the first governor? Was the small log structure outside the fort really a defensive outwork? And why did the colonists go to the effort of making bricks from the local clay? These are the questions that scholars hoped to answer in an extensive, professional dig funded by National Geographic from 1991 to 1993. This skilled team of excavators–with a little luck–revealed America’s first scientific laboratory, where the Elizabethan scientist Thomas Harriot analyzed North American natural resources and Joachim Gans assayed ores for valuable metals./Famed archaeologist of Colonial America Ivor Noël Hume describes the labor-intensive process of discoveries at Fort Raleigh.

The Englishman Ivor Noël Hume was a colossus in the twentieth-century world of archaeology, internationally recognized as the leading expert in post-medieval material culture. Brought to Colonial Williamsburg in the late 1950s from London’s Guildhall Museum, he imposed modern standards of excavation, recording, and artifact analysis. There, an insistence on accuracy, combined with the ability to stir the public’s imagination, opened doorways to the past for thousands. Noël, as he was known to his friends, trained the next generation of historical archaeologists and set an example for those unfortunate not to have been associated with him. Noël’s death left his report on the Fort Raleigh excavations unfinished, but he ensured that two of his long-term associates would carry it to completion.

Both Eric Klingelhofer and Nicholas Luccketti are former Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists, trained by the internationally recognized expert Ivor Noël Hume. They participated in the 1991–93 National Geographic excavations at Fort Raleigh, and the late Noël Hume later asked them to complete his report for publication. Eric Klingelhofer is Emeritus Professor of History at Mercer University, and Nicholas Luccketti is president of the James River Institute for Archaeology. In 2003, they founded First Colony Foundation, which researches Sir Walter Raleigh’s New World colonies.