New World, Real World: Improvising English Culture in Seventeenth-Century Virginia

CULTURE IS INDIVISIBLE FROM PLACE. SOME BELIEFS, CUSTOMS, AND practices can be transplanted from one location to another and come through more or less intact. Others are significantly altered by the alien conditions they encounter in their new surroundings. The four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown has renewed scholars' interest in the transfer of cultures from the Old World and their reception and transformation in the New. Those whose starting points are Africa, the Mediterranean, northern Europe, and the British Isles tend to emphasize how geopolitical realignments and social and economic upheavals in places where migrations began set in motion events that reshaped societies and restructured economies half a world away. (1) Those who see the transatlantic movement of peoples and cultures from the receiving end, from the colonies, are often most impressed by the circumstances that challenged the assumptions that settlers brought with them and that they began adjusting almost as soon as they unpacked their bags. The two viewpoints, taken together, produce no surprises when they inform us that successful overseas migrants were traditionalists by instinct and improvisers of necessity. Where these analytical approaches break new ground is when they show how that balance was struck. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Students of material culture are place-bound more than most scholars. Because archaeological sites and vernacular buildings are rooted in the landscape, specialists who study them are best acquainted with the destinations where long-distance travelers to North America eventually settled. Archaeologists, zooarchaeologists (animal bone specialists), folklorists, and architectural historians collect physical evidence in those places that should help historians understand important cultural adjustments that otherwise are often poorly documented in written records. Nowhere is such information about the earliest settlements on the American mainland more plentiful than it is in Virginia and Maryland, where public and private research organizations have conducted archaeological excavations and architectural surveys for almost two generations (see Figure 1). Colonial Williamsburg and the National Park Service at Jamestown Island pioneered modern, systematic field research beginning in the 1930s; those institutions and others have extended the work to the rest of the Chesapeake Bay region since 1970. (2) The sheer volume of material evidence assembled by field-working historians is nothing less than staggering. The investment of time, talent, and funds in collecting this body of new information, not to mention the intellectual capital it represents, raises a reasonable expectation that scholars from various kindred disciplines were working together in anticipation of the Jamestown quatercentenary. In reality, collaborations have been rare. (3) The quantity and complexity of archaeological and vernacular building evidence are partly to blame. So are material culture specialists themselves. Seldom have they gone out of their way to help uninitiated colleagues zero in on historical problems that the physical record might usefully inform. Archaeological collections are vast archives of raw data. Artifacts numbering in the millions can be used to tell many different stories or (too often) no story at all, at least not stories that are sufficiently original to make notable contributions to a broader understanding of the past. One promising exception is the interest that many scholars from different disciplines now share in the learning process that colonization set in motion. As surprising as it sounds, certain groups of artifacts recovered from seventeenth-century Chesapeake sites, when skillfully interpreted, throw light on some of the make-or-break choices that spelled the difference between success and failure for colonists. This essay brings to that larger conversation pertinent archaeological evidence of three kinds--animal bones, farm buildings, and the excavated remains of Jamestown. …