WTLN - Early Jamestown's Way With Mud

Joshua Graml of Colonial Williamsburg mus inside a inside the barracks building at Jamestown. Archaeologhists and students are building with "mud and stud" structures similar to those unearthed from the remains of the 1608 fort. (Joe Fudge, Daily Press / July 10, 2012

By Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com | 757-247-4783

11:12 p.m. EDT, July 15, 2012

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 fromJamestown 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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