Ivor Noël HumeBesprekingen

I received this from paperbackswap.com in June 2023.

Entertaining, but a little dated, and patronizing toward the ladies. But in exchange for these flaws, you get a vivid sense of the curmudgeonly antiquarian-author's character, up to and including his radical pessimism about the future of the human race. The afterword is an object lesson in scholarly caution: It candidly lists all the things the original 1963 text and captions got wrong.

In the seventies, Colonial Williamsburg acquired the James River plantation, Carter’s Grove. In order to show plantation life in the 18th century, the Foundation needed to establish the locations of the outbuildings and other features of the original plantation. They discovered much more, the remains of an early seventeenth century settlement, Martin’s Hundred. Since the discovery of the original fort at Jamestown was years in the future, this was the first archaeological evidence of those early settlers, including evidence of the Indian attack in 1622. The book chronicles the events surrounding the discoveries up to 1982. Written by archaeologist Ivor Noël Hume, the book reads like a mystery with clues, false trails and a lot of research in American and European museums and libraries.

The book is enhanced with numerous plans of the site as well as photographs of some of the finds, unfortunately in black and white and not in color. Noël Hume explains everything in clarity, whether talking about bones, pipes or pieces of pottery or glass. There are footnotes, index and a very nice bibliography. However this is not a dry and scholarly account, but a very readable and exciting story.

Having been born and raised in New England, and now finding myself a transplant in Virginia, I was self-admittedly somewhat oblivious to Virginia's beginnings. Hume's book was a great place to start. He covers both the archeological evidence, interwoven with a good accounting of the history of Roanoke and the James Towne settlement.
I was amazed at the amount of suffering and violence that the English meted unto themselves and to the native Americans that lived in the region.
The debunking of some of the myths surrounding Capt John Smith, Powhatan and Pocahontas are every bit as riveting as the mythology that has survived up to the present.
A great survey of the early English attempts to establish themselves in the New World.