JAMES CITY ——
More than 400 years after America's
first permanent English settlement rose from the ground, archaeologists are combining local clay, loam and black needle rush grass in an experimental effort to recreate the unique method used to construct some of the colony's earliest buildings.
The project blends archaeological evidence gleaned from
Jamestown with research into the traditional mud-and-stud building techniques of Lincolnshire, England, which was the home of such key settlers asCapt.
John Smith and carpenter
William Laxton.
It also requires
Preservation Virginia archaeologist David Givens and his
Historic Jamestowne students to learn on the job, employing their eyes and fingertips in a trial-and-error attempt to unlock the lost secrets of the simple but age-old tradition of building with mud.
"We can talk about the ingredients and the recipe all day long. We know the materials used in the mud-and-stud buildings here pretty well," Givens says.
"What we don't know much about is the implementation. This is a lost art. So we're trying to use this reconstruction process to get back into the mindset of the colonists and see how it was done."
Led by project director William M. Kelso, archaeologists unearthed their first fragments of
James Fort's early mud-and-stud buildings during the excavation of a long barracks-like structure back in the mid-1990s.
They knew right away the otherwise ordinary-looking clods of clay were significant because of the unusual textures impressed into their sides.
"All we could see were the marks left by the reeds and the studs," Kelso says. "And now we're using them to help us with the experimental reconstruction."
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