Identifying Seventeenth-Century Africans and High-Status Englishmen at Jamestown, Virginia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Emerging investigative techniques and access to reference skeletal series and comparative databases allow enhanced interpretation and recognition of individuals in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region for which few documentary sources or identifying artifacts exist. As part of a pilot study of burials from Jamestown, genome-wide ancient DNA were obtained from four poorly preserved skeletons: a male and female excavated from within the 1607 Fort palisade, originally identified as colonists from the first years of the settlement, and two high-status males buried in the chancel of the 1608 church. Based on historical and bioarchaeological evidence, the latter are suspected kinsmen of the colony’s first governor, Thomas West, 3rd Lord De La Warr. Archaeological, historical, genealogical, osteological, and genetic evidence are integrated in this approach. The male and female excavated from the Fort possess African ancestry—most closely related to present-day Nigerian populations—with no European ancestry. The men in the church have European ancestry and share a rare mitochondrial haplogroup that may be indicative of unanticipated maternal relatedness. This interdisciplinary study demonstrates how remarkable methodological analyses can transform interpretations often guided by preconceived notions of identity based on site context and the inherent limitations of the historical and bioarchaeological record.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 29867