ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601120005
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: JAMESTOWN
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
Bill Kelso's greatest adventure began one afternoon around 1962 or '63 in the library of Ohio's Baldwin-Wallace College.
The restless history major put down his books and started flipping through magazines. His eye snagged on a story about an archaeological dig at Jamestown, Va.
He read that scholars thought the James River had long ago washed away the original 1607 James Fort, starting point of America's first permanent English settlement.
Kelso didn't know a thing about archaeology. He'd never been to Jamestown.
But he looked at the pictures and decided the scholars were wrong.
Now he's back to prove it.
This winter is nasty on Jamestown Island. The ground is cold and hard. The icy James River laps just over the seawall within feet of Kelso's deep trenches. Fall winds ripped tents off the dig site in late autumn, then two feet of snow early this month flattened them to the ground.
Weather shut down Kelso's dig at New Year's, but his crew will whip their trowels out again as soon as that precious piece of Virginia soil begins to soften, maybe in March.
There's no time to waste.
Kelso, former chief archaeologist at Thomas Jefferson's homes in Charlottesville and Bedford County, is in the decade-long first phase of Jamestown excavations, ambitiously titled Jamestown Rediscovery I and sponsored by the prestigious Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.
By 2007, the 400th anniversary of the landing at Jamestown and less than a dozen years away, the APVA hopes to mount a major new exhibit on the first colony with new information from the Kelso team.
Kelso figures his dig will stretch on much longer, maybe 30 years and probably after his death.
"I'm not here to finish this site," he says wryly at the age of 54.
You can lay all kinds of patriotic language on it - cradle of democracy, birthplace of America. What Kelso is after are the earliest traces of English people in this country, the people who established our style of government.
He's following in the footsteps of Jean Carl "Pinky" Harrington, John Cotter, Ivor Noel Hume and other historical archaeologists who over the years have searched for the original fort.
Even if he doesn't find it, Kelso already has made his mark here. Since his archaeologists began digging a year and a half ago, they've unearthed the oldest English artifacts ever found on Jamestown. They've found things of just the right vintage to support Kelso's contention that he's in the original fort.
Among the 80,000 artifacts are coins from the 1590s and the first years of the 1600s and adornments and household furnishings brought from the Old World by the hundreds who came and died of starvation, disease and Indian attack.
The archaeologists have found sky-blue glass trade beads and copper that craftsmen used in making other beads to trade for food from the Algonquin Indians. They have uncovered Indian pottery probably used by the settlers.
Lending more credence to Kelso's supposition that he's in the earliest fort are an armory's-worth of musket parts, sword hangers, bullet molds, lead musket balls, armor plates and the first intact helmet ever found on the island - an iron cabasset, or "pot" helmet.
If Kelso were finding things just a few years newer, it might suggest his site was an extension of the fort, not the original one. But "it's so consistently early," he says of the body of artifacts, "it seems to me it's original. There's nothing here saying we're dealing with a site from the 1630s."
A prize of the Kelso dig is a portcullis, a heavy iron grating suspended by chains and lowered between grooves to bar the gateway of a fortified town. Kelso has been told this type of grating wasn't used before 1609, so he's thinking it may have been installed just a few years after the fort was built.
His team has exposed what seem to be bulwarks or bastions, projections around the edge of a fortification, arranged to give a wide firing range. Ground-penetrating radar has detected what may be yet another bastion on the other side of Jamestown's old church tower.
Before he can be sure he's digging within the fort, Kelso must find all the bastions and establish their pattern, in effect outlining the triangular fort. He calls it "connecting the dots."
As he labors, some of the nation's best-known archaeologists are peering over his shoulder.
"There are more archaeologists per square mile in this area than probably anywhere in the world," says Eric Deetz, one of Kelso's field archaeologists and son of prominent University of Virginia archaeologist James Deetz.
Kelso's most esteemed observer in Williamsburg is Ivor Noel Hume, the father of historical archaeology in this country and Kelso's mentor when he was in graduate school at the College of William and Mary.
Longtime chief archaeologist for Colonial Williamsburg, Noel Hume was the first chairman of the Kelso dig. He left the project last year. Kelso did not want to discuss their parting, and Noel Hume did not return calls asking for an interview.
But in last summer's issue of Colonial Williamsburg magazine, Noel Hume seemed to throw chilly water on Kelso's optimism. He acknowledged that the excavation has found amazing stuff and that the cabasset and a deposit of cullet (waste glass) found by the Kelso crew could mean they are in the first fort because they might have been left when colonists abandoned the fort in 1610.
But Noel Hume pointed to an interpretation of a John Smith map that indicates the fort indeed was eroded into the James River, and he speculated that the dig might not be as groundbreaking as Kelso hopes.
"Because it is virtually impossible to distinguish between artifacts of 1610 and those, say, of 1613 or 1615,'' Noel Hume wrote, "one cannot yet rule out the possibility that in 1994 the A.P.V.A. began digging not in James Fort but in the suburb that grew from it. If this is so, then the cullet and helmet scenarios are worthless - save as a reminder that in archaeology one scrape with a trowel can transform plausible hypotheses into bad guesswork."
A person close to the archaeological work at Jamestown said the Kelso dig couldn't accommodate two such passionate archaeologists as Kelso and Noel Hume. "Any time you have a project of any magnitude," he said, "someone has to have the final word."
At least for now, Kelso has it.
Kelso and his wife are the only people now living on 1,500-acre Jamestown Island.
"I appointed my wife the mayor," he says of Ellen Kelso, an English teacher at a Williamsburg middle school. "We laugh and say we have to keep the colony permanent."
When tourists leave each day, the Kelsos have the island to themselves. They jog around a 5.5-mile loop and walk their bassets, James and Jeremiah. They watch the geese fly in and out.
The APVA owns 22.5 acres of the island around Kelso's dig site. The National Park Service owns the rest.
Kelso commuted from his Albemarle County home, an old grist mill at North Garden, for two years when he ran the dig at Poplar Forest, Jefferson's country home in Bedford County. Now he walks just 30 seconds from the Godspeed Cottage to this dig.
"No gas, no miles on the car," he says, grinning.
This is not their first time around Williamsburg. Bill Kelso spent 15 years on excavations at Carters' Grove and Kingsmill plantations and other Tidewater historic sites.
During graduate work in early American history and culture at William and Mary, he volunteered for a dig with Ivor Noel Hume. Within months, he had a job with Noel Hume and a quick start in archaeology. Kelso later got a Ph.D. in history from Emory University.
Kelso's no stuffy academic. Son of a General Motors engineer and a newspaper reporter in Ohio, he plays bluegrass banjo and guitar with Ellen Kelso on upright bass in a band called Out of the Bluegrass. They used to be in one called Wry Grass.
Kelso insists he doesn't mind that he's moved from his 5,000-square-foot house at North Garden to this tiny one, just 750 square feet; that he owns no home for the first time in his adult life; or that he took a pay cut to come here.
"I've never been richer," he says. "This is the Super Bowl for me. I've always had this haunting feeling that there was something left of the original Jamestown. I never believed that it was lost."
Kelso is so fired up about Jamestown that last summer, when a visiting digger mentioned he'd seen a 17th-century map of Virginia at The Hague, the Kelsos quickly arranged to fly to the Netherlands to look at it.
Without knowing a word of Dutch or being able to read street signs, they rented a car, got lost and accidentally parked outside the right place. Within five minutes, Bill Kelso was gazing at a Dutch West India Company map of the James River, circa 1617. Kelso saw what he believes is James Fort on the map. If he confirms it, the map further bolsters his claim that the fort wasn't west of his dig site and wasn't washed away.
He says historians, fixated on English documents on Jamestown, neglected valuable historical materials in other countries that were exploring the world in 1607.
At the same time Kelso is exploring at Jamestown, he's working with Nicholas Luccketti, his partner in the private Virginia Company Foundation Inc., on finding the so-called "Lost Colony" of settlers said to have disappeared from Roanoke Island on the North Carolina Outer Banks. They may lead digs around Virginia at places where they think the Roanoke Islanders went.
Kelso is unconventional in his views about history. He raised eyebrows in Charlottesville a few years ago with his research on Jefferson's slaves. Some of Virginia's best-known historians heatedly rejected other scholars' claims that Jefferson had children with a slave mistress named Sally Hemings, but Kelso said his excavations at Monticello lent some credence to the story.
At Jamestown, he's interested in more than just John Smith, John Rolfe and Pocahontas. He wants to know about the working class too and was excited to find evidence of the work of craftsmen. Kelso says they've gotten a bum rap from scholars who concluded that since no gold has been found at Jamestown, the craftsmen didn't do anything. From the artifacts Kelso's finding, it appears craftsmen kept the settlement alive with items to trade for food from the Indians.
Kelso tries to get his hands in the dig whenever he's in Jamestown, but seldom does. He spends most of his time raising money to continue the $350,000-a-year project. Soon, he'll be trying to get the General Assembly to continue the state's support.
The Disney movie "Pocahontas" brought a higher than usual number of kids and parents to Jamestown last year, and so did the excavations, park service workers say. At Kelso's insistence, school groups and other visitors can walk close to the dig and archaeologists will show them their latest discoveries.
"Other 17th-century sites I've worked on were a lot of hard work for not a lot of gains," said archaeologist Eric Deetz. "This one is full. There's never a time that you don't find stuff."
Some of the most unusual discoveries - like the fragile, encrusted cabasset helmet scanned at a local hospital so archaeologists could see see through the shell of clay around it - are on exhibit at the Dale House near the dig throughout the winter.
For all he's found, you can't get Kelso to say straight-out that he's found the fort. He refuses to jump to conclusions.
"The more I do of this," he says of archaeology, "the less I do of that."
He said the facts will emerge from the earth.
"I think that archaeology is a pretty democratic way of looking at history," Kelso said, explaining that it's more reliable than reconstructing history from paper documents. Record-keepers make errors, slant their accounts.
"Nobody," he said, looking out across his dig, "faked this."
Until now, Dennis Blanton, co-director of William and Mary's Center for Archaeological Research, didn't think Kelso was in the fort. He thought it had washed away.
"I used to give him a hard time - `You're wasting your time,''' Blanton said he told Kelso. "Now I think they're on to something. I told Bill, `I'm ready to eat my crow dinner.'''
Even if Kelso's team isn't digging in the original fort, Blanton says, "What they have is astounding. There's no question, they're recovering the earliest English artifacts of any quantity that's ever been seen in this area or maybe the New World. They've got truckloads of it. It's impossible to ignore."
For information on the dig, call the APVA in Jamestown, 804/229-0412.
LENGTH: Long : 227 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Bill Tiernan/Landmark. 1. Archaeologist Bill Kelso isby CNBleading the Jamestown dig. "Even if this isn't James Fort," says
Kelso, "I'll take it. It sure is significant, whatever it is." 2.
Alaric Faulkner, a professor from the University of Maine, spent a
week in December at the Jamestown site looking for artifacts. 3.
Visitors to Jamestown (above) can watch the dig in progress. 4.
Among the artifacts (left) are clues to a military life: parts of
sword hilts, knife blades and pieces from muskets and pistols.
color.