Mysterious Knight's Tomb: Oldest Gravestone in America?

[Music] my name is Jonathan Appel and I was brought in to take a look at this historic tomb that had been placed on the floor embedded into concrete since the early 1900s and all started with an email that was sent to me and I followed up on that and as soon as I heard it was at Jamestown I became very interested because everyone's heard of Jamestown so I went back and forth and fortunately was able to schedule a quick visit here in person I was able to come in and take a look at this beautiful tomb and study it pretty closely and what I thought was going to be a quick visit ended up being a hour plus discussion about how we could deal with with freeing it from the concrete and and moving it and then conserving it so we started here yesterday morning trying to free this tomb from the cement it was set in there was a very hard Portland cement colored darkly along the top edge kind of acting as a protective skirt around it now Portland cement became very common and very widely used material in the early 1900's and unfortunately it was used in many different ways incorporated into historic materials and a great number of historic buildings have been detrimental II affected by Portland cement being combined with historic building materials that are much more that are softer that are more porous that have different characteristics and so the they really shouldn't be combined I was able to grind it free from that concrete and then chisel under it and fortunately they did us a great service by not embedding the entire slab into wet hard Portland cement paste mortar instead they set it on shims on a brick pedestal and slate shims and then a lime mortar was used so it actually came out pretty easily once it was once the concrete the hard point 'ln cement based material was removed it had been previously broken according to a picture from 1905 a photograph or series of photographs fortunately were recovered and so once all the cement was removed around the edge and underneath hand chiseled carefully I was able to pry away individual fragments one at a time and remove them from the original setting and so we put them on this adapted kind of utility trailer which I created a platform and and then we raised it by tipping it and putting it on the platform and then getting planks under it and then using rollers a kind of very simple version of something we know at least the Egyptians used that far back to basically push it up a ramp and with the help of a handful of strong individuals got it safely onto the platform without incident and we're all happy it's its resting nicely here awaiting conservation the next step is going to be to actually prepare each piece to get them ready to be joined together again so it can you know look like it did you know originally basically and its shape and everything and so in order to do so we're going to have to clean all the mating surfaces on the stone along the edges there's a lot of residue and old Portland cement repair material we also uncovered some paper material that was under the surface and it appears that they use that to create a dam and then pour liquid Portland cement pigmented into the joints in order to use as infill and to close the joints cosmetically one of the defining things about it is there's no inscription on it because all of the lettering was inlaid in metal and unfortunately lost so makes it very unusual having no inscription that could even be read under close analysis so we could only theorize based on the archeology and things that are found here on the site and that's what this is all about it's about the archaeology that's happened and that the fines that are being uncovered and so that was the driving force to move this tomb from its location that it had been placed in in about 1905 so that they can dig under it and so it'll be interesting to see what is uncovered once the dig begins and these things take a lot of time and patience and it'll be exciting to see what's underneath the first thing that I noticed as soon as I brush the dust off is the how incredibly beautiful the stone is it still has a radiance to it and you can see especially coming with the natural light coming through the windows you know reflecting the light it still actually has a polish on it and that's after you know hundreds of years and multiple events and the structure has burned down and then was reconstructed the stone itself is in amazing condition so the age of this is unknown because the inscription is missing but it can be theorized and maybe as more archaeology is done they'll have better understanding of who this might be but if it was possibly that one of the original founders George Yardley who passed away in 1627 clearly that would be by far the oldest colonial gravestone in America and most of the earlier stones were not nearly as elaborate and I have never seen anything with extensive metalwork from the 1600s ever anywhere you

Channel: JamestownRediscovery

Views: 760,374

Rating: 4.5610738 out of 5

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

Id: iii316ytxPY

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2017