There’s a gift shop and a restored 17th-century church. The starving time is represented by debris found in a barracks cellar—the bones of a horse bearing butchery marks, and the skeletal remains of a black rat, a dog and a cat. The colonists were ambushed, Ratcliffe was taken prisoner and tortured to death, and only 16 of his men made it back to the fort alive (and empty handed).But Jamestown proved to be neither paradise nor gold mine. But Smith’s journal “is obviously slanted,” says Kelso. Yet the evidence has already caused historians to reconsider some longheld assumptions about the men and the circumstances surrounding what YaleUniversity history professor emeritus Edmund S. Morgan once called “the Jamestown fiasco .” “Archaeology is giving us a much more concrete picture of what it was like to live there,” says Morgan, whose 1975 history, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia , argued that Jamestown’s first years were disastrous. On Cameo and 2.) And a $5 million “archaearium”—a 7,500-square-foot educational building that will house many of the colonial artifacts— is to be completed for the 2007 quadricentennial.Fingerprint Analysis Reveals New Insights on Prehistoric Rock Art's CreatorsIn the conventional view of Jamestown, the horror of the starving time dramatizes the fatal flaws in the planning and conduct of the settlement. In another room, Straube opens a drawer and pulls out a pitted piece of iron—round, with a point protruding from its center. But the reputation of Jamestown as a failure will be a hard one to shake, he adds: “It will take a lot more than a half million artifacts to show that the Virginia Company learned from its mistakes and made a go of it in the colonies.”This Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Is Filled With Corpses' Ghostly SilhouettesWhy Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' Still Resonates TodayThe surge in research at the original Jamestown can be traced to 1994, when the APVA , anticipating the colony’s 400th anniversary, launched a ten-year hunt for physical evidence of Jamestown’s origins and hired Kelso, who had excavated 17th-century sites near Williamsburg and was then conducting historical research at Monticello. Most of what is known of Jamestown’s grim early years, he notes, comes from the writings of Smith—clearly the most prolific of the colony’s chroniclers—and a handful of his compatriots, along with a few sketchy records from the Virginia Company in London. “Of course. Were it not for the timely arrival of British supply ships in January 1608, and again the following October, Jamestown, like Roanoke a few years before, almost certainly would have vanished.Humans Wiped Out Two-Thirds of the World’s Wildlife in 50 YearsAn example is the tale of Smith’s rescue by the Indian princess Pocahontas, which Smith first related in his writings in 1624, some 17 years after the incident. The new record is six consecutive years, which occurred from 2010-2016. Why, after three growing seasons, were the men of Jamestown still unable or unwilling to sustain themselves? But not all. “Here we believe we have evidence of an Indian woman, inside the fort, cooking for an English gentleman,” Straube says. John Smith, Jamestown has been largely ignored in colonial lore in favor of Massachusetts’ Plymouth Colony. The Inside Story of the 25-Year, $8 Million Heist From the Carnegie LibraryThe Hunt for the Modern-Day Pirates Who Steal Millions of Tons of Fish From the SeasTo the english voyagers who waded ashore at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on a balmy April day in 1607, the lush Virginia landscape must have seemed like a garden paradise after four and a half months at sea.