Dig Deeper Episode 69 - The Governor's Well Part III - The Final Story a 360 Video

some of the archaeology team is down here in a well um we're filming in 360 CU we wanted to bring you into our world uh down in the earth here at Jamestown but this well we believe dates to the governor's house uh which is an addition uh to the governor's house I should say that was put on in 1617 now in archaeology we have suppositions about things um when we find them and then we have to dig them to find that out now the focus of this video is about why we dug this well how we found found it what we found in it and how climate change is affecting this feature and why we dug it so despite being one of the focal points for our 2022 2023 excavation season this wasn't the initial reason we came over to dig in this area we actually came over here because we wanted to see if the dry moat that encircled the Confederate Fort Pocahontas from 1861 had cut across a very early ditch this ditch was identified on one John Smith map from 1608 and no Maps after that so as we were digging inside the moat that's actually when we first saw the well at the very bottom of that moat and um we knew that the top had been destroyed but we had the bottom 5et left which luckily for us was the best bit anyway um as soon as I saw the bricks I knew it was going to be a very big deal we find cool stuff all the time here but that day is the only day I've ever seen every single member of the organization no matter where they work or what apartment all flock out to a site at once to see what we had just found and this is because Wells are uniquely incredible for artifact preservation the other really interesting thing about that day was looking at the reactions of the staff members who had been here since the beginning of the James toown rediscovery project in 1994 or shortly after they were able to look at this well and actually recognize it because it looked so similar to one that we dug in 2003 it was almost uncanny that well dated to around 1617 Construction which made a lot of sense for this will too because where we are right now is right next to the 1617 Governor's residence so um obviously that was an incredible thing to find it um but my favorite part of this whole process that took over a year was actually getting to dig it so to talk more about that I'm going to pass it over to Sean thanks Natalie so as soon as we decided we were going to excavate into this well we knew we had uh to make things safe before we did that Wells are kind of dangerous they're deep in the ground you're dealing with water you're dealing with loose soils so the very first thing we did was to get Dave to design this wooden ring and then the team built it on site now these wooden Rings make it so that no soil from the outside can collapse in we can't get trapped down here um and this is very very important because it's stable as soil might seem when you dig down it's often not very it can loosen up it can fall in particularly when you're dealing with water so this was the first step into making sure we could get in here and safely look the second thing we ended up doing was digging down around some of the brick work which used to come up to about here we've removed several courses of brick and we removed parts of the Builder's trench the idea was we wanted to expose the brick work around the outside first see how stable it was get a sense of how it was built and then we could start deconstructing all those bricks and removing them so we could access the deeper fill inside the well now before we took any the bricks out we had Matt Webster from C wiers come and take a look at the bricks he's an expert and he said that this construction although it seemed kind of ramshackle to us at first glance was actually done by expert hands back in the 17th century the folks who built this well knew what they were doing knew how to make it stable and despite the fact that it didn't look so great it was really very s now we started deconstructing the well piece by piece and although These Bricks look just like your standard everyday bricks right now once we cleaned them up we found they had some unique attributes like this one right here this brick was actually left out that rain on in the 17th century we've seen several just like this a lot of the other bricks have Impressions from leaves or from animals we've got a couple that have been stepped on by birds and we even have some that look like they have handprints or finger marks on that so we've got an actual tangal connection to the 17th century from these bricks once we removed enough to access the interior safely um then we started digging out all the cool artifacts and stuff inside which Maran is going to talk about so like Sean said after all that preparation months and months of work we were finally able to get to the actual Target which was the interior of the well and it started with dry soils at the top a lot of it was filer trench that washed in during Civil War while it was open um to this level as as a note and we were able to at that time quarter and BCT so that we could get a profile running profile going down but very quickly within a couple of feet we reached the inundated layers at the water table and that's where we started to find things uh beyond the case bottle glass we' seen up top and the bricks but we got into pieces of Swords one of them even had an inscription on it um the um sword pommels the sword hilts pieces of breast plates um some of them still with tassets and and buckles still attached we also started to see an artifact that matched with the other brick well that we dug a military build um an exploded gun barrel uh Dave and I were working in here one day early on when we just reached the water table and he reached around and pulled up a full pommel Hilt um and part of a blade of a sword and that was one of the most incredible artifacts we had seen so far from the well as we reached the water table that we also started to see the things we were really looking for the Organics the Botanical things that do not survive anywhere else on the site except for in the wells and when we got to that level um we had to pause for a second remove some of that brick work that Sean mentioned uh get I think we started with nine courses or so of brick to reach the level where we could safely um reach in and and move through the soils to try to find the objects um when we're working in here a lot of it's done by hand we also will use the spray nozzle on the hose to kind of gently remove the soil around the outside of the objects uh to pull them up but in some of the years you're finding objects that are so big it's very hard to remove while reaching down uh we even found these large stones that we know from working with geologist at the College of w Mary they're not local to this area that's an ongoing research question we have about where they came from and one of those cobbles was so big that we actually had to remove it with a chain oist um it's just incredible um one thing we started to see uh right away in terms of Botanicals is seeds leaves uh we had five uh pits or stones for plums um just that kind of stuff we just never get to see on site uh shoes shoe leather survives at this level and um a we even had pieces of wood wooden conbs all of that material that we started to see um that just like said doesn't survive anywhere else um getting down to the very bottom we started to see the kind of living surface so while the well was in use the things that were dropped in accidentally and we found uh pipe bows uh dated to the early 17th century uh Venetian glass that easily could have been from the household of the governor that's just up the hill from here and um we were been working in there one day and Sean looked up at me and he said I have something stuck in my thumb and I looked and it was a straight pin that was as gold as you could from the day it was dropped in no oxidation whatsoever um on the straight pin piece and then right after he pulled up these pieces of cord rope that survived for you over 400 years just incredible and then uh to cap it all off uh one of the last days digging down in the bottom uh Dave pulled out one of his dream artifacts I'll let him talk a bit about that yeah the the artifact I've never found in in over 30 years of excavation is a a copper alloy spoon found many Peter spoons which don't really survive in our Virginia acidic soils and so to find a a a spoon like that to me is very humanizing because that's somebody was probably washing their dishes at the well and that fell in um and so to me that that that represents something a unique experience in which you're connected to to past peoples now one day out here while Excavating a visitor wanted to talk about climate change and why we were engaging digging this well versus somewhere along the marsh and I think that's why we're filming in here today everything that we've talked about from the excitement of finding it to being safe the artifacts we found climate change now we're the bottom of this is well down 12T below the ground surface original ground surface and the geology of Jamestown island is such that we have sulfur Rich uh clay down impermeable clay down at the bottom of this well now when you introduce salt water to that which we know is coming into the aquafer the the perch aquafer here at Jamestown then that mixes with the sulfur the salt water and phosphates and you get hydrogen sulfide now all the stuff Marana talked about the ropes we found shoes seeds those are things you do not see from the early 17th century and because the bottom is an anerobic environment our only chance is right now today because in the future from our research this will then be underwater how the safety fits into it is if this water is too high that we can't get down in there there then you may not recover those things so if we care about James toown we care about early America and the story of how we became us as a nation today then these although seemingly minute bits of the the story are critical for us as a project as we go along and there are many many Wells here uh throughout Jamestown in particular on this property that we know of and so obviously you can see from this design this isn't our first rodeo this is uh the third iteration or the third version of The Well ring uh that we built and I think in the future we will end up having to go into the Jamestown Wells and recover that information and again that information involves First Peoples first English and first Africans and many many other cultures that pass through here and if we don't get to that information we're going to lose it now next steps for this are preservation in place we're all standing on the last bit of the Builder's trench it is possibly unsafe for us to continue as we are now in the water table and despite our amazing engineering skills of pumps and walls I think that we're going to preserve this in place so we will be putting sandbags down in here and then we're going to fill this ring up with dirt up to here at least and then fill in this larger Hole uh after putting down geotextile fabric so archaeologist in the future um may be able to get back in here um there is of course the brick left and then a wooden ring in the bottom which we do not want to take out because it's it's destabilizing this area already so that is the summary of this well in our lives for several weeks um last last fall

Channel: JamestownRediscovery

Views: 6,971

Keywords: Jamestown, James Fort, Achaeology, Preservation Virginia, Pocahontas, John Smith, Jamestown Rediscovery

Id: BSLHWr7PwAg

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2024