When the team uncovered the 1608 church where Pocahontas married John Rolfe, the 2010 find ranked among the world’s most important…”It’s a good thing the postholes were so big and so deep — or they wouldn’t have survived the plows,” Kelso says, pointing to a rectangular pattern of stains that — so far — perfectly matches William Strachey’s 1610 description of “a pretty chapel” 24 feet wide and 60 feet long.

When archaeologist William Kelso began digging at Jamestown in 1994, few historians gave him much chance of finding the long-lost English fort of 1607.

Most believed the pioneering outpost had disappeared into the James River by the 1800s. Some noted that Kelso himself was among several luckless archaeologists who had probed the site before and come away empty handed.

But 17 years after first sinking their shovels into the soil, Kelso and his team have not only found the “Holy Grail” of American archaeology but also rewritten the story of the nation’s first permanent English settlement.

Instead of being lost, building after building left its footprint in the ground, preserving a townscape that was previously known only through scattered descriptions. A million artifacts have surfaced too, debunking many long-held myths about the Jamestown colonists’ character.

When the team uncovered the 1608 church where Pocahontas married John Rolfe, the 2010 find ranked among the world’s most important. But that triumph hasn’t stopped the celebrated archaeologist — who turned 70 in March — from launching one of his most ambitious seasons.

In addition to searching for the west end of the church, Kelso and his staff — aided by the students of the Jamestown Rediscovery summer field school — will probe the remains of an unusually well-preserved “mud and stud” structure that may have been the fort’s 1608 guardhouse. They’ll begin exploring a previously untouched area near the 1907 Memorial Church and open up a critical part of the Confederate earthwork heaped on top of the forgotten fort in 1861.

They’ll also hunt for signs of an expansion that may have doubled the fort’s size — and convinced settlers to move their church to the middle of the newly enlarged outpost in 1617.

“Our original goal was to find the fort — then trace its evolution through time,” Kelso says.
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