FROM THE ENGLISH ship Hopewell anchored off the coast of what is now North Carolina, Governor John White watched with elation as a column of smoke rose into the summer dusk.

The plume from Roanoke Island “put us in good hope that some of the colony were there expecting my return out of England,” he wrote later. Three years had passed since the governor had set out from the first English settlement in the New World on what was to be a brief resupply mission, leaving behind more than a hundred men, women, and children. But his return voyage had been delayed again and again by the outbreak of war with Spain. At last, on August 18, 1590, White and a party of sailors waded ashore on Roanoke Island. According to White’s account of events, they spotted fresh footprints but met no one. As the men climbed a sandy bank, they encountered a tree with the carved letters “C R O.” This was, the governor explained, a prearranged code. If the settlers were to leave the island, they should carve their destination into a tree or post. Adding a cross would mean they left in an emergency.

Reaching the abandoned settlement, the governor spotted a post on which “in fair capital letters was graven CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress.” Yet the post itself was part of a defensive palisade thrown up after White had left—a clear sign that the settlers had prepared for an enemy attack.

Croatoan was the name of both a barrier island to the south and the indigenous people who lived there, Carolina Algonquian speakers closely allied with the European newcomers. One of their young men, Manteo, had traveled twice to London and served as an essential guide, interpreter, and diplomat for the English.

White desperately wanted to reach Croatoan, a mere 50 miles to the south—though he also mentions that the colonists originally intended to move 50 miles inland. A series of setbacks and lack of provisions scuttled his plan to continue the search. On returning to England, he found Sir Walter Raleigh, the colony’s wealthy patron, busy organizing a new venture in Ireland. Without deep pockets to finance a transatlantic expedition on his own, White never returned to the New World. The 115 colonists—including Eleanor and Virginia Dare, White’s daughter and infant grandchild—were all but forgotten, marooned on a distant shore.

Two decades later the English established their first permanent beachhead in the Americas, a hundred miles to the north on the James River, in what is now Virginia. Captain John Smith, the leader of the Jamestown colony, heard from the Indians that men wearing European clothes were living on the Carolina mainland west of Roanoke and Croatoan Islands. Tales of mass slaughter and an enslaved “young maid” circulated in London and Jamestown. Search parties, however, never found any physical proof of the colonists’ fate.

And so it would go for the next 400 years, as one investigation after another into what had happened on Roanoke Island proved fruitless. The absence of evidence spawned wild speculation, hoaxes, and countless conspiracy theories. But in recent years a series of finds at archaeological digs—and a chance discovery at the British Museum—have revealed tantalizing new clues that suggest what happened to the settlers after White departed. Historians, meanwhile, are starting to recognize that Roanoke was more than a passing failure. The effort was, in essence, the Apollo program of Elizabethan England, spanning six years and three major voyages.

The first, in 1584, was a reconnaissance mission. The following year an all-male contingent—with White as expedition artist—defied Spanish claims to North America and arrived on Roanoke hoping to find gold, valuable pharmaceuticals, and a shortcut to the Pacific. Instead they made enemies of their Native American hosts by assassinating their leader. Ragged and hungry, the men caught a ride home less than a year later with a fleet commanded by Sir Francis Drake. The following spring, in 1587, White led a third expedition made up primarily of middle-class Londoners, including his pregnant daughter, Eleanor Dare, as well as 16 other women and nearly a dozen children.

All told, more than a score of oceangoing ships carried hundreds of people across the 16th-century equivalent of interplanetary space. The bold venture dwarfed in size and scope the later—and more renowned—forays to Jamestown and Plymouth, birthed the first corporation in English America, and forged the link between England and the mid-Atlantic coast of North America that seeded both the British Empire and the United States.

“The profound significance of Raleigh’s Virginia voyages to the history and culture of the modern world is often forgotten or undervalued,” writes Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum. The museum houses White’s extraordinary paintings, which helped shape Europeans’ conception of the New World and its inhabitants.

Despite the governor’s belief that the settlers went to Croatoan, searchers found no evidence there until after 1993, when a hurricane exposed large amounts of pottery and other remnants of a Native American village.

“We English lost it, so I guess it’s up to us to find it again,” Mark Horton says cheerily. The archaeologist from the University of Bristol stands on the lip of a rectangular hole shaded by gnarled live oaks. Just over the wooded dune, Pamlico Sound laps rhythmically against the North Carolina beach.

In the 1580s a nearby inlet made this an ideal spot to gather scallops and oysters, and catch turtles and fish. Patches of fertile soil were suitable for growing corn, squash, and beans. When the inlet closed a century or so after White left, this became part of Hatteras Island, a long boomerang of blowing sand and maritime forest angled deep into the Atlantic.

A local organization, the Croatoan Archaeological Society, sponsors an annual dig led by Horton. Since 2013, the team has uncovered a variety of Old World objects mixed in with Native American artifacts in the heart of a village. They include the remains of what appears to be a gentleman’s dress sword called a rapier, along with some scraps of European copper, the barrel of a gun, lead shot, and a piece of drawing slate with its lead pencil.

Horton suspects the slate might have belonged to White, who may have used it to make sketches of the local people. The haul is one of the New World’s few troves of arguably Elizabethan artifacts, all in the very place Governor White had believed the lost colonists had gone.

Though nearing retirement age, Horton has the pudgy red cheeks and keen enthusiasm of an English schoolboy. As we talk, a team member nearby hands a bucket heavy with muck to a volunteer, who pours it into a box with a fine-mesh screen. She hoses down the material and swiftly plucks out a minuscule baby blue bead made in Italy. Later that day a thin, round object surfaces that was manufactured in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1648 to weigh the silver in a Hungarian coin called a ducat. By the mid- to late 17th century the new global economy encompassed even isolated Croatoan Island.

“I would never argue that they all end up here,” Horton says of the colonists. “But this is where they would be welcomed and supported. I suspect they would have sent the women and children here; it’s almost certain this would be where Virginia Dare turns up.”

Yet most of the objects that appear Elizabethan were found among other material, such as tiny glass beads and broken pottery that likely date to more than a half century after White’s failed rescue attempt. “It’s deeply problematic that this stuff turns up two generations later,” Horton admits. He suggests that the older Elizabethan objects may have been kept by the children or grandchildren of abandoned settlers who may have assimilated with the Croatoan. But even some members of the excavation team suspect the material could have arrived through trade with later English settlements.

On the other hand, animal bones from trash heaps suggest an abrupt dietary switch from fish and turtles to deer and birds—evidence that could hint at indigenous people using European guns early in the contact period, guns the lost colonists may have provided.

There’s no doubt, however, about the age and authenticity of the watercolors White made during his stint as expedition artist in 1585. Among these is a colorful map of eastern North Carolina, gaily decorated with English ships and Indian canoes. The chart, based on careful measurements by the expedition’s brilliant scientist Thomas Harriot, is also remarkably accurate.

Brent Lane, who taught heritage economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, grew up fascinated by Lost Colony legends and owns a modern copy of White’s watercolor map. In 2011 he became curious about two faint patches on his copy. The British Museum initially was slow to respond to his request to probe what lay under the original’s coverings. He persisted.

When the curators put the painting on a light table three months later, the star-shaped symbol of a fort appeared under one patch. The location of the fort was just as startling: It lay not on Roanoke Island but some 50 miles away, at the head of Albemarle Sound—matching White’s mention that the colonists planned to relocate “fifty miles into the main.” And on top of this patch was the barely perceptible outline of a fort as well, drawn in what may have been invisible ink made with urine—a hint that the patch was meant to conceal a secret rather than fix an error.

“Every generation in the last 400 years has taken this search on,” Lane told a crowded press conference announcing the discovery. But “none of them had this clue. This is really a solid lead.”

Archaeologists from the First Colony Foundation, a North Carolina nonprofit devoted to Roanoke-related archaeology, set out to investigate the area indicated on the chart. They focused on a piece of land beside a cove perfect for hiding a ship from Spanish scouts. In a nod to the cloak-and-dagger nature of the find, they named it Site X.

“No social media!” barks archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti when I arrive at the site one hot summer morning, having promised not to reveal its precise location. “No Facebook, no tweeting, no texting!” Workers in a half dozen trenches are tossing dirt into buckets that in turn are dumped into mesh screens where the dirt is closely examined for the smallest artifacts.

Luccketti, a short, stocky Virginian, is on edge. He fears some of the excavation volunteers have tipped off potential looters. Since work began in 2012, the team has retrieved L-shaped bits of metal, possibly used for stretching out a tent or animal skin, as well as an aglet, a tiny tube used to secure the end of a wool lace. A brass buckle and lead seal also could date to Elizabethan times.

The archaeologist believes his ace in the hole is a few dozen broken bits of pottery. Standing at a plastic table in the middle of the field, he pulls a triangular piece of green pottery from a plastic bag. The outer surface is green and smooth, and the inner side pink and rougher. The ceramic was manufactured on the boundary between Surrey and Hampshire Counties in southern England and is therefore called Border ware. To be honest, it’s not much to look at. Luccketti reads my mind.

“The mundane nature of this is what makes it important,” he says. “If it was a pretty object, then the Indians might collect it.” In other words, this English pottery was probably left where it fell rather than reused by Native Americans. Luccketti feels sure I’m holding part of a bowl used by a lost colonist. “We think this was where they came after Governor White left,” he concludes confidently.

His conviction hinges on a logical but arcane argument. At early English settlements such as Jamestown, Border ware made up a hefty percentage of the pottery, but over time that percentage rapidly declined. By the time the English colonists arrived in the Site X area about 1660, Border ware was relatively rare. Yet here it’s common.

Other archaeologists remain skeptical. They insist that Luccketti must come up with other lines of evidence—such as the grave of an Elizabethan colonist—to clinch his case. When I see Luccketti in late 2017, after a final excavation at Site X, he’s not as sanguine.

“We don’t know exactly what we’ve got here,” the archaeologist says ruefully. “It remains a bit of an enigma.”

Throughout colonial North America, most of the English captured by Indians or who deserted refused to return, even if given the chance. Unlike Europeans, Native Americans in the colonial era typically welcomed men, women, and children of any origin into their ranks. Though some warrior-age men were killed and others enslaved, the vast majority were accepted as full members of the tribe.

In such small-scale societies, there was power in numbers, and newcomers were swiftly taught Indian language and skills that replaced their European ways. If the lost colonists followed this path and assimilated quickly into Carolina Algonquian society, as many historians believe, they may have left evidence in the form of DNA in their descendants.

When explorer John Lawson visited the area in 1701, he heard that the Hatteras Indians claimed that “several of their ancestors were white people … the truth of which is confirmed by gray eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no others.” He assumed that the lost colonists “conform’d themselves to the manners of their Indian relations.”

During the past decade, Michigan-based computer scientist Roberta Estes has been gathering genetic data to test Lawson’s theory. “You can use DNA to look through a periscope that goes far back in history,” she says. But the image remains stubbornly fuzzy.

Since no one has pinpointed modern English descended from colonist relatives, Estes has nothing to compare with her samples from current-day descendants of eastern North Carolinians. Extracting DNA from 16th-century bones on Roanoke Island, Hatteras, or at Site X could provide a reliable link between the settlers and their descendants, but that genetic material remains elusive.

“I don’t want people to come away with the idea that DNA is a magic bullet,” adds Estes, a dark-haired woman with indigenous ancestors. “But it could solve some of this mystery by inferring that the colonists survived.” New pieces of the puzzle, including English genealogical records and excavated human remains that yield DNA, could emerge in time.

On Hatteras, some members of old families maintain that their ancestors were Native Americans. Real estate records indicate that a small community of Indians remained on the island as late as 1788, two centuries after the Roanoke settlers arrived, but there is no sign of Indian traditions that persisted into the 20th century. Estes also has yet to find evidence of Native American DNA among today’s long-term inhabitants.

Some of the Indians, however, moved to the mainland swamps to the west to join Algonquian cousins known in the 18th century as the Machapunga. This area, still boggy backcountry more plentiful in wildlife than people, is where John Smith was told Europeans could be found. Incoming Europeans and Africans subsequently mixed with the Machapunga. In the mid-19th century, racial purity laws designated most nonwhite North Carolinians as black. That had the effect of obliterating the intricate distinctions of mixed ethnicities that still characterize the people in the state’s thinly populated east.

Early in the 20th century a visiting anthropologist identified a group of people called the Machapunga living on the mainland. Though they’d lost their native tongue and were considered black, they retained distinctive Algonquian ways of cooking and making baskets and nets. By the 1920s, drawn by better opportunities, a hundred or so of this group had moved to Manteo, the seat of Dare County, on Roanoke Island. “Today, the ancestry of these people is so predominately Negroid that any Indian blood is thoroughly disguised,” another anthropologist wrote about Manteo’s Machapunga in 1960.

If the lost colonists melted into the Croatoan and then the Machapunga, their fate is rich with historical irony. By the late 19th century, a popular myth imagined Virginia Dare as a beautiful blond-haired and blue-eyed virgin in a wilderness filled with dark savages. She also was a powerful symbol of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. If she lived to have a family of her own, the most likely descendants of this fancied forest damsel are the African Americans now living within a few miles of her birthplace.

That would mean that even before the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, the American melting pot already was bubbling with a diverse genetic mixture of English and Native Americans—and possibly Africans as well. Sir Francis Drake liberated hundreds of black slaves, likely including Muslims, in Caribbean raids in 1586. Many historians argue that he dropped them at Roanoke Island when he rescued the all-male colony and that they intermingled with Carolina Algonquian society.

One rainy spring morning I visit the chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras tribe. Marilyn Berry Morrison meets me at the door of her suburban home in Chesapeake, Virginia. Though she looks African-American, her Indian-print dress and intricate ponytails braided in leather straps proclaim her identity.

“I claim Native American based on tradition,” Morrison explains, though she doesn’t deny her mixed white and black heritage. Her tribe has yet to win state or federal status, and family DNA consists of only a smattering of Indian genes. She’s nevertheless adamant that her parents and grandparents retained Algonquian ways to fish, heal, and cook.

I ask her about the link to the Roanoke settlers. “We were the Lost Colony,” she responds. “Our surnames, like ‘Berry,’ appear on the colonists’ list. We are the original melting pot.”

But hers is not a sweet tale of openhearted assimilation. “We killed the men and took the women and children,” she adds matter-of-factly.

Morrison pulls out a thick family album and flips through the pages. Her ancestors’ skin colors range from ivory to ebony. My eyes fall on one name that lacks a photograph. “She was my great-great-grandmother,” Morrison says. “She was from Roanoke Island.” Her name was Virginia Dare Bowser Tillet.

Leaving Morrison’s house, it occurs to me that our 400-year-old obsession with the Lost Colony isn’t just about what happened to a group of English migrants on a remote island. In a nation fractured by views on race, gender, and immigration, we’re still struggling with what it means to be American. Maybe, I think, we’re all latter-day John Whites, searching for clues in our distant past to guide us through an unsettling present and into the uncertain future.

The post It Was America’s First English Colony. Then It Was Gone. appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

Roanoke Island, shown in the foreground in this aerial view of the Outer Banks in North Carolina, on June 12, 2014, was the site of the “lost colony” where Virginia Dare was born more than 400 years ago. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

Virginia Dare and the myth of American whiteness.

With Confederate statues toppling while President Trump taunts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” it’s clear that our nation’s current divisions reach deep into our shared past. But one of the strangest of those battles is over a baby born on a remote North Carolina island more than four centuries ago.

Like Robert E. Lee or Pocahontas, Virginia Dare is as much mythical as she is historical. The first English child born in the New World, she is famous for vanishing along with the other 115 colonists at Roanoke Island who made up England’s first attempt at settling the New World. Less well known than her disappearance, though, is her persistence as a potent symbol of white supremacy. Unlikely as it may seem, the story of this innocent child, about whom we know little more than a name and date of birth, provides a surprising window into the origin of our current national anxieties about race, gender and immigration.

For two-and-a-half centuries after the colonists vanished, the failed Roanoke venture was largely forgotten. Then, in 1834, Harvard historian George Bancroft wrote a best-selling work that cast the botched effort as a romantic mystery. He also resurrected “the first offspring of English parents on the soil of the United States.” Female writers, eager for inspiring women and girls from the country’s past, seized on this brief mention. In an 1837 magazine story recently unearthed by English professor Thomas Shields, Eliza Lanesford Cushing coined the term “Lost Colony” and created the legend of the fair-skinned Virginia dazzling the swarthy Indians with her beauty and skill. But Virginia remained chaste, keeping their “uncontrolled passions” at bay.

The story spawned a genre, one perfectly suited for an era in which white Americans felt under threat from outside forces. In the 1830s, an influx of non-British immigrants alarmed white Americans and a mercurial president, whose promise to clean up Washington split the country in two with his radical policies. Race relations were volatile and violent; tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced west while Nat Turner led a slave rebellion that was brutally suppressed. The plight of an innocent white girl wandering the dark forest among lusty savages spoke to Americans who worried that people of British heritage were losing their grip on the young republic. Soon, newspapers were referring to “the first Anglo-American, Miss Virginia Dare,” and legends proliferated of her forest life as a kind of American Artemis.

Her popularity spiked again at the turn of the 20th century, when more than 1 million immigrants each year flooded into the United States, prompting white fears of “race suicide.” (Italians and Jews, who made up the bulk of the new arrivals, typically were not considered white.) In a 1901 best-selling poem, an evil Indian shaman — one of the “slaves of superstition” — turns Virginia — the “heir of civilization” — into a white doe. She eventually dies a tragic death to pave the way for British domination of the savage continent.

Not coincidentally, this also was heyday of Jim Crow in the American South; the following year, Virginia politician Carter Glass backed his state’s plan to eliminate black people as a political factor and thereby ensure “complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.” He went on to become U.S. treasury secretary. At the 1907 exposition celebrating Jamestown’s 300th anniversary, Virginia Dare was hailed in the North Carolina exhibit as that “infant child of pure Caucasian blood” who launched “the birth of the white race in the Western Hemisphere.”

Her birthday celebration on Roanoke Island became an annual ritual to reinforce Anglo-American power. At the 1910 gathering, North Carolina’s Episcopal bishop urged the crowd to forget the idea that the Lost Colonists mixed with Native Americans rather than starve, which is what most historians today say was the most likely outcome. They would, he insisted, have endured “a nobler fate” — martyrdom — rather than choose survival with barbarians. Marrying outside one’s race, in North Carolina and throughout the South, had long been illegal. Better to die than assimilate.

The myth of the independent and resourceful child of Roanoke also gave courage to suffragists, who often mixed claims of white women’s superiority to black men into their fight for the vote. Gertrude Weil, a progressive Jewish activist in North Carolina, tried to convince white male legislators in 1920 to give women the franchise. But she knew the all-white and all-male legislature would never support empowering black women. To assuage their concerns, she printed a broadside for lawmakers that read, “We plead in the name of Virginia Dare, that North Carolina remain white.”

Even now, white supremacists and their allies claim Virginia Dare as their own. Peter Brimelow, a friend of former White House aide Stephen K. Bannon and current White House adviser Stephen Miller, founded the Vdare Foundation and vdare.com in 1999 to warn Americans about the danger posed by African and Asian immigrants.

“I picked the name because I wanted to focus attention on the very specific cultural origins of America, at a time when mass nontraditional immigration is threatening to swamp it,” he wrote me. Brimelow originally is from Britain. One of his website’s postings notes that the Lost Colonists “simply found themselves outvoted, which is going to happen to us if we are not careful.”

Others draw a different conclusion. Behind the tales of a white girl in doeskin is a deeper truth about immigration. “New Americans step up to become the most American,” says North Carolina writer Marjorie Hudson, who authored a book about the Virginia Dare myth. “It is time to let go of some of the childish thoughts about how this country was formed,” she argues. “Our country’s past is no more pretty than any other country’s wayward history.”

Virginia Dare’s story reveals our desire to assimilate and our anxiety about doing just that. This conflict is at the root of the cultural battle that led to violence last summer in Charlottesville, as white Americans confront the growing numbers of black and brown people with whom they share a country. The infant of Roanoke offers us two very different futures. We can be martyred for some imagined race, or we can recognize that to be American is, in its essence, to be willing to redefine our beliefs, goals and even our ethnicity. Only by getting lost can we become something new.

The post How a child born more than 400 years ago became a symbol of white nationalism appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

Scholars will take a fresh look at the authenticity of a rock purporting to reveal the fate of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island.

ON A FALL morning in 1937, an Emory University geologist was walking down a hallway in the alumni building when he bumped into a middle-aged man carrying a rock. The man explained that he was a tourist who had found the 21-pound stone near the North Carolina–Virginia border. He was looking for someone to explain the strange markings on its gray surface.

When a team of Emory scholars deciphered the carved message, they were stunned to find a heartrending plea from a grieving daughter to her father, detailing the bloody murder of her husband and child—and potentially solving the nation’s oldest mystery.

The writer claimed to be Eleanor Dare, and the message was addressed to her absent father, Governor John White. Married to Ananias Dare, Eleanor gave birth to Virginia—the first English child born in the New World—shortly after the English colonists landed on Roanoke Island.

The carefully carved letters told a bone-chilling story. “Father Soone After You Goe for England Wee Cam Hither,” the tale begins. The colonists suffered two years of “Onlie Misarie & Warre” that led to the death of more than half the settlers. Tragedy struck when Indian shamans warned that the spirits were angry and all the remaining English, save seven, were abruptly killed. Among the dead were “Mine Childe” and “Ananais to Slaine wth Much Misarie.” The dead were buried four miles east of “This River,” with their names “Writ Al There on Rocke.” The tourist said he found the stone about 50 miles inland from Roanoke Island, matching White’s passing mention that the settlers had planned to move “fifty miles into the main.”

The Emory team declared the stone’s message to be authentic, and the find quickly became America’s most surprising archaeological discovery on the 350th anniversary of the Lost Colony. Soon after, a Georgia stonecutter found more than three dozen stones, also claiming to have been written by Dare. They told a gothic story of a nightmarish trek by Eleanor and the remaining colonists, ending not far from what is now Atlanta, Georgia.

By then, Emory officials had grown skeptical of the first stone’s authenticity after the tourist could not be located, and the rock was transferred to Brenau College outside Atlanta. In 1940, a team of three dozen experts led by the esteemed Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison met at Brenau to study all the rocks. They declared that “the preponderance of evidence points to the authenticity of the stones.”

The news made headlines around the nation. But a skeptical reporter with the Saturday Evening Post, in a devastating 1941 investigative article, unmasked the Georgia stonecutter as a fraud. The revelation damaged academic careers and embarrassed Brenau. For the next three quarters of a century, the so-called Dare stones, including the first found by the tourist, were hidden in a college basement.

In 2016 the president of Brenau, geologist Ed Schrader, took the first stone to the University of North Carolina at Asheville for analysis. After slicing off one end of the quartzite stone, he discovered the interior was bright white, while the exterior and carvings were much darker. The original inscription would have been a stark contrast to the weathered exterior—a good choice for a Roanoke colonist but a poor one for a modern forger.

As Matthew Champion, who leads the United Kingdom’s Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey, explains, a freshly cut inscription “would appear bright white on the stone, particularly so on this type of stone, and it takes a great deal of time for that whiteness to fade.” Champion and Schrader agree that using chemicals to mask the color—particularly in the 1930s—would have been difficult.

Eric Doehne, a Los Angeles art conservator who analyzed the Dead Sea Scrolls and Sistine Chapel frescoes, says that new methods for identifying trace elements and isotopes, as well as ultraviolet and multispectral photography, could help determine the truth of the stone’s message. But detailed chemical analysis of the carving’s crevices has yet to be done.

Epigraphy—the study of inscriptions—could provide another line of evidence. Heather Wolfe at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., examined high-resolution images of the stones and concluded, “There is nothing that jumps out as a forgery.” Her one doubt was the use of Eleanor Dare’s three initials, EWD. This was not a standard way to sign one’s name in that era.

Another scholar of Elizabethan literature, Jean Wilson of Cambridge University, adds, “There’s nothing in the inscription that couldn’t be of its purported date.”

Not everyone agrees. Citing the initials, the use of Arabic numerals, and several word choices unlikely to have been in Eleanor Dare’s repertoire, Diarmaid N.J. MacCulloch, a Tudor historian at Oxford University, dismisses the carved message as having “all the plausibility of Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent in Mary Poppins.”

What’s needed, says Champion, is a multidisciplinary study of the stone that uses new advances in chemical analysis, epigraphy, and the study of rock-cut Elizabethan inscriptions to produce fresh data. Brenau’s Schrader hopes to organize such a study in the near future to see, once and for all, whether the message writ on rock is one of America’s most important artifacts—or a remarkable fake that duped some of the country’s most respected scholars.

The post Is This Inscribed Stone a Notorious Forgery—or the Answer to America’s Oldest Mystery? appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

At Stelida on the Greek island of Naxos, researchers have found stone tools perhaps made by Neandertals.
Jason Lau/Stelida Naxos Archaeological Project

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Odysseus, who voyaged across the wine-dark seas of the Mediterranean in Homer’s epic, may have had some astonishingly ancient forerunners. A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans.

The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an overview of recent finds at a meeting here last week of the Society for American Archaeology. “The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don’t have seafarers until the early Bronze Age,” adds archaeologist John Cherry of Brown University, an initial skeptic. “Now we are talking about seafaring Neandertals. It’s a pretty stunning change.”

Scholars long thought that the capability to construct and victual a watercraft and then navigate it to a distant coast arrived only with advent of agriculture and animal domestication. The earliest known boat, found in the Netherlands, dates back only 10,000 years or so, and convincing evidence of sails only show up in Egypt’s Old Kingdom around 2500 B.C.E. Not until 2000 B.C.E. is there physical evidence that sailors crossed the open ocean, from India to Arabia.

But a growing inventory of stone tools and the occasional bone scattered across Eurasia tells a radically different story. (Wooden boats and paddles don’t typically survive the ages.) Early members of the human family such as Homo erectus are now known to have crossed several kilometers of deep water more than a million years ago in Indonesia, to islands such as Flores and Sulawesi. Modern humans braved treacherous waters to reach Australia by 65,000 years ago. But in both cases, some archaeologists say early seafarers might have embarked by accident, perhaps swept out to sea by tsunamis.

In contrast, the recent evidence from the Mediterranean suggests purposeful navigation. Archaeologists had long noted ancient-looking stone tools on several Mediterranean islands including Crete, which has been an island for more than 5 million years, but they were dismissed as oddities.

Then in 2008 and 2009, Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island co-led a Greek-U.S. team with archaeologist Curtis Runnels of Boston University and discovered hundreds of stone tools near the southern coastal village of Plakias. The picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces were so plentiful that a one-off accidental stranding seems unlikely, Strasser says. The tools also offered a clue to the identity of the early seafarers: The artifacts resemble Acheulean tools developed more than a million years ago by H. erectus and used until about 130,000 years ago by Neandertals as well.

Ancient island-hopping
Recent finds in the Ionian and Aegean seas suggest that early modern humans and Neandertals may have voyaged to remote islands before 130,000 years ago.

Strasser argued that the tools may represent a sea-borne migration of Neandertals from the Near East to Europe. The team used a variety of techniques to date the soil around the tools to at least 130,000 years old, but they could not pinpoint a more exact date. And the stratigraphy at the site is unclear, raising questions about whether the artifacts are as old as the soil they were embedded in. So other archaeologists were skeptical.

But the surprise discovery prompted researchers to scour the region for additional sites, an effort that is now bearing fruit. Possible Neandertal artifacts have turned up on a number of islands, including at Stelida on the island of Naxos. Naxos sits 250 kilometers north of Crete in the Aegean Sea; even during glacial times, when sea levels were lower, it was likely accessible only by watercraft. A Greek-Canadian team co-led by Tristan Carter of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, uncovered hundreds of tools embedded in the soil of a chert quarry. The hand axes and blades resemble the so-called Mousterian toolkit, which Neandertals and modern humans made from about 200,000 years ago until 50,000 years ago. These tools require a more sophisticated flaking method than Acheulean types do, including preparing a stone core before striking flakes off it.

Dating work on the artifacts is ongoing and Carter declined to comment pending publication. But Cherry says the Naxos evidence may be persuasive because it is well stratified, which means researchers should be able to date it more securely. “It is very convincing, because there are a lot more tools in situ,” adds Strasser, who, like Cherry, was not involved in the dig. “It is a quarry site littered with Mousterian stone tools.”

Other Paleolithic tools that appear to be Mousterian have been recovered on the western Ionian islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos. The plethora of sites adds weight to the idea of purposeful settlement. “People are going back and forth to islands much earlier than we thought,” Simmons says.

But determining which of today’s islands were truly islands tens of thousands of years ago isn’t easy, as it depends on local land movements as well as broader sea-level changes, says Nikos Efstratiou, an archaeologist at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. On the Aegean island of Lemnos, his team found what he thinks is a Paleolithic hunting camp dating back more than 10,000 years. But he can’t yet be sure when Lemnos was cut off from the mainland. Efstratiou adds that archaeologists need to better characterize the sorts of tools made on the mainland and the islands, so they can find links between the mainland and island peoples.

Other archaeologists are already reckoning with the possibility that humans and our cousins went to sea thousands of years earlier than had been thought. “We severely miscalculated,” admits Runnels, who excavated at the Crete site. If his colleagues are right, he says, “the seas were more permeable than we thought.”

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Poppies, shown here with seed pods, have been used to produce opium in the Near East for some 5000 years.
PHOTO: ISTOCK.COM/OZTURK

For as long as there has been civilization, there have been mind-altering drugs. Alcohol was distilled at least 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, about the same time that agriculture took hold there. Elsewhere, for example in Mesoamerica, other psychoactive drugs were an important part of culture. But the ancient Near East had seemed curiously drug-free—until recently.

Now, new techniques for analyzing residues in excavated jars and identifying tiny amounts of plant material suggest that ancient Near Easterners indulged in a range of psychoactive substances. Recent advances in identifying traces of organic fats, waxes, and resins invisible to the eye have allowed scientists to pinpoint the presence of various substances with a degree of accuracy unthinkable a decade or two ago.

Cypriot jugs were crafted in the shape of the poppy seed pod 3000 years ago.
PHOTO: ROBERT S. MERRILLEES

For example, “hard scientific evidence” shows that ancient people extracted opium from poppies, says David Collard, senior archaeologist at Jacobs, an engineering firm in Melbourne, Australia, who found signs of ritual opium use on Cyprus dating back more than 3000 years. By then, drugs like cannabis had arrived in Mesopotamia, while people from Turkey to Egypt experimented with local substances such as blue water lily.

Some senior researchers are still dubious, pointing out that ancient texts are mostly silent on such substances. Others consider the topic “unworthy of scholarly attention,” Collard says. “The archaeology of the ancient Near East is traditionally conservative.”

But the work is prompting fresh thinking on the relationship between substances and societies. At the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East here last week, for example, one scholar even reinterpreted well-studied ancient images as representing drug-taking rituals and drug-induced distortions.

Drug use almost certainly began in prehistory and spread with migrations. For example, the Yamnaya people, who swept out of Central Asia about 5000 years ago and left their genes in most living Europeans and South Asians (see p. 252 ), appear to have carried cannabis to Europe and the Middle East. In 2016, a team from the German Archaeological Institute and the Free University, both in Berlin, found residues and botanical remains of the plant, which originates in East and Central Asia, at Yamnaya sites across Eurasia. It’s difficult to know whether the Yamnaya used cannabis simply to make hemp for rope or also smoked or ingested it. But some ancient people did inhale: Digs in the Caucasus have uncovered braziers containing seeds and charred remains of cannabis dating to about 3000 B.C.E.

Once people organized into city states, they may also have started large-scale production of pharmaceuticals, says archaeologist Luca Peyronel of the International University of Languages and Media in Milan, Italy. A decade ago, before the onset of Syria’s brutal civil war, he was part of a team that gathered samples from an unusual kitchen in a palace in the northwestern Syrian city of Ebla, which flourished 4 millennia ago on the outskirts of the Sumerian and Akkadian empires.

The room lacked the plant and animal remains typically associated with food preparation. But residue analyses on pots found there may explain the mystery, as Peyronel and his colleagues described in a paper last year: The researchers found traces of wild plants often used for medicine, such as poppy for opium to dull pain, heliotrope to fight viral infections, and chamomile to reduce inflammation. Given that the space contained eight hearths and pots that could hold 40 to 70 liters, the drugs could have been made in large quantities, Peyronel says.

Some of these extracts, such as opium, can induce hallucinations, although it’s unclear whether the potions were used in ritual or medicine. The kitchen’s location near the heart of the palace suggests its products were used for ceremonial occasions, and cuneiform tablets from the building mention special priests associated with ritual beverages, Peyronel says. The distinction between medicine and mind-altering drug may have been lost on ancient peoples. “The two hypotheses are not necessarily at odds,” he adds.

Three hundred kilometers due west and several centuries later, the ancient people of Cyprus used opium in religious ceremonies, Collard says. Residue analyses show that between 1600 and 1000 B.C.E., people poured opium alkaloids into pots crafted in the shape of the seed capsule of the opium poppy, in what Collard calls “prehistoric commodity branding.” All the jugs were found in temples and tombs, suggesting a role in ritual. Opium jugs made on Cyprus have been found in Egypt and the Levant—the first clear example of the international drug trade.

Other substances less well known today may have played a role in healing or ecstatic rituals in the ancient Near East. When King Tutankhamun’s tomb, dating to the 14th century B.C.E., was opened in 1922, archaeologists found the boy-king’s body covered with the flowers of blue water lily, a common motif in many Egyptian tomb paintings. Steeped in wine for several weeks, the plant yields a sedative that produces a calm euphoria.

Diana Stein, an archaeologist at Birkbeck University of London, claims archaeologists have long studied scenes of rituals involving drugs and their effects without realizing it. She argues that the banquet scenes that often adorn small seals found Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran actually show people imbibing psychoactive potions. Another common motif, interpreted as a scene of contest, may instead represent the internal conflict that results when the imbiber faces an alternative reality, Stein proposes. In these images, “everything is distorted and pulsing—but they certainly knew how to carve things realistically when they wanted to,” she said at the meeting here.

“I find Diana’s arguments convincing and even energizing, as they open up a new avenue for research,” says Megan Cifarelli, an art historian at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.

But others are more cautious. “Scholars have tended to shy away from the possibility that the ancient Near Easterners partook of ‘recreational’ drugs, apart from alcohol, so it’s good that someone is brave enough to look into it,” says archaeologist Glenn Schwartz at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. But he says Stein’s suggestions “seem to go too far on too little evidence,” a view echoed by many at the meeting.

Collard, however, is confident that additional residue and botanical analyses, along with study of iconography and texts, will gradually persuade skeptics. Cifarelli notes that the ancients likely used drugs not just to heal, but to forge sets of beliefs, and contact a spiritual realm where healing and religion were entwined. “Most of us,” she says, “are so far removed from that kind of transformative magic.”

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Some Yemenis suggest that the 2800-year-old Marib Dam, one of the country’s best known ancient sites (shown
before it was bombed), was deliberately targeted.

A new front has opened in the destruction of archaeological heritage in the Middle East. Across northern Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State (IS) group devastated antiquities during its reign of terror starting in 2014, pulverizing classical statues such as those of Palmyra in Syria and bulldozing a 3000-year-old ziggurat at Iraq’s Nimrud. The IS group has now been routed by Iraqi and Syrian forces, curbing the destruction but giving archaeologists a firsthand look at an aftermath that is grimmer than many had expected. Meanwhile, the assault on antiquity has extended to Yemen, 2000 kilometers to the south, another archaeological treasure house riven by conflict.

“Our immortal history has been wasted by wars,” lamented Mohanad Ahmad al-Sayani, chair of Yemen’s General Organization of Antiquities and Museums in Sana’a.

In Yemen, the cultural losses have gone largely unnoticed by the wider world but are keenly felt by archaeologists. Although the country has been far less studied than Mesopotamia, it played a critical role in the rise of empires and economies in the region starting around 1000 B.C.E., researchers said at a meeting here last week of the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.

By 1200 B.C.E., the kingdom of Saba in what is now central Yemen controlled the export of frankincense, derived from a tree that grew only along the country’s southern coast. The prized resin was burned for a millennium and a half in temples from Persia to Rome. The vast wealth of Saba—home to the biblical Queen of Sheba—funded impressive temples, cities, and engineering marvels.

Among them was the Marib Dam, built on Wadi Adhanah in the eighth century B.C.E. to help expand agriculture in this arid region; some claim it is the world’s oldest dam.

Today, Yemen is racked by civil war and Islamic extremists who, in a campaign against heresy, have destroyed ancient mosques in the port city of Aden, and a multidomed shrine in the Hadhramaut region (see map, right).

Bombs dropped by the Saudi-led coalition have wreaked the most damage, Al-Sayani said. The Marib Dam, in an unpopulated area far from the capital, was struck in 2015, leaving a deep gash in the well-preserved northern sluice gate. The regional museum of Dhamar in the southwest, which contained thousands of artifacts from the Himyarite Kingdom, was completely destroyed. The Himyarites conquered Saba in 280 C.E., took over the frankincense monopoly, and became key players in the expanding Indian Ocean trade between the Roman Empire and India until Ethiopian forces overthrew them in 525 C.E.

Al-Sayani showed images from a dozen flattened or severely damaged sites, including medieval castles such Aden’s Sira Fortress, and the centuries-old al-Qassimi neighborhood in Sana’a. More than 60 sites have been destroyed or severely damaged since the conflict began in 2015, Al-Sayani said, chiefly from Saudi bombings. Although some were strategic targets, he charged that the Saudi attacks were a conscious campaign to wreck Yemen’s heritage and demoralize its citizens. “After 3 years of assessing the damage, I believe the bombing is being done with a purpose, since many of these sites are not suitable or useful for military use,” he says.

The destruction seems deliberate, agrees archaeologist Sarah Japp of Berlin’s German Archaeological Institute. “The Saudis were given information on important cultural heritage sites, including exact coordinates,” by UNESCO, said Japp, who was based in Sana’a before the war. UNESCO intended to protect the sites, but she fears that the data may instead have been used for targeting. “There is no reason to say all of these [bombings] are just accidents.” The Saudi embassy in Berlin and officials in Riyadh did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Meanwhile, 2000 kilometers to the north in Syria and Iraq, the damage wrought by years of IS group control is only now coming into focus. “It is nothing short of a catastrophe,” said Michel al-Maqdissi, former head of excavations in Syria’s antiquities department in Damascus, who now works at the Louvre in Paris and maintains contacts in Syria. Some of the worst reports come from Mari, a 60-hectare site on the banks of the Euphrates River that 4000 years ago was one of the world’s largest cities. Just north of Sumer and the Akkadian Empire, Mari served as a key trading center for Mesopotamian goods and Anatolian metals and stone, and once boasted the best preserved early palace in the Middle East.

But no longer. Archaeologist PascalButterlin of Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris, who worked at Mari for years and has gathered information from Syrian sources, displayed an image of the palace from the ground that shows near total destruction of Mari’s central area. The site’s ancient statues were removed to museums long ago, so the reasons behind the destruction remain murky, although the IS group’s desire to profit from antiquities is well-known. A nearby large moundcalled Tell Medkouk was bulldozed completely to unearth objects for looting. From satellite data on the center of Mari, Butterlin estimates that looters dug some 1500 pits, many of them more than 5 meters deep and 6 meters wide. The vehicle tracks “make it look like they had traffic jams there,” he said. He suspects that thousands of looted cuneiform tablets, small figurines, and bronze objects won’t show up on the art market for years, as sellers wait for international outrage to cool.

The situation is even worse at Dura-Europos, which until recently was a remarkably well-preserved city upstream of Mari. From the first century B.C.E., this city lay on the frontier of the Roman and Persian empires, which took turns controlling it, and once held both one of the world’s oldest Jewish synagogues and oldest Christian churches. “The scale of the disaster there is profound,” said Chekmous Ali, a Syrian archaeologist now at the University of Strasbourg in France. “There are innumerable pits—some 9500—and the necropolis is gone.” Across the border in Iraq, the old city of Mosul once boasted a host of Islamic and Christian monuments, many destroyed or damaged during the IS group’s 3 years of control. But the worst devastation came last summer, when more than 30,000 bombs and missiles hit historic buildings during the battle for the city, said Karel Novácˇek of Palacký University Olomouc in the Czech Republic. “The old city was annihilated,” he said at the meeting. He charges that the destruction continues, as Iraqi construction crews clear the wreckage without trying to preserve what’s left or tally the damage.

“The heritage management is nonexistent,” he said. “We need careful removal of the rubble, but that is not happening.” His team is assembling what data they can from old reports and photographs that could provide
some basis for reconstructing historic sites. He plans to lead an on-the-ground assessment in June, in hopes of providing Iraqis a chance to mend what they can of their battered cultural heritage.

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The Kurdish capital of northern Iraq – Erbil – has become a regular feature of news reports recently since it has become a strategic focal point in the turmoil around the region. But Andrew Lawler, the contributing editor of Archaeology explains, explains this is not the first time Erbil has been at the crossroad of opposing armies.

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Greek Orthodox priests taking part in a procession inside the Katholikon, or Catholicon Chapel, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. (Eddie Gerald / Alamy Stock Photo)

For decades it was known only as the “graffiti stone.” Leaning against a wall in a shadowy corner of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher, the big blank rock the size of a dining-room table invited scribbling by passing pilgrims and tourists.

But two Israeli researchers who recently examined the other side of the stone say the neglected artifact appears to be part of the high altar fashioned in the early 12th century by medieval Crusaders for the holiest church in Christendom, and upon which Mass was celebrated for more than 500 years. The stone’s intricate design, they add, is based on what was the latest Roman style and suggests a direct link to the papacy itself. The revelation highlights the complicated religious politics that still trouble Jerusalem.

The Crusaders were heeding the call of Pope Urban II, who in 1095 urged Western Christians to assist the Byzantine Empire in recovering territory long ruled by Muslims, including Jerusalem. When the European invaders arrived four years later, they put tens of thousands of the city’s inhabitants, Muslims and Jews alike, to the sword and rushed to the Holy Sepulcher, the shrine to the death and resurrection of Jesus. The victorious knights immediately ejected the Greek Orthodox clergy, whom they suspected of both heresy and complicity with Islamic rulers (the eastern and western churches had split in 1054). They then seized control of the city’s other sites sacred to Jews and Muslims as well as Christians, forbidding those of other faiths from entering Jerusalem.

The Roman Emperor Constantine, who legalized Christianity, approved construction of the Holy Sepulcher in 326 A.D., and ordered “that it should surpass all the churches of the world in the beauty of its walls, columns, and marbles.” He had a Roman temple demolished to make way for a massive 250-foot-long basilica and an open-air colonnade enclosing the traditional site of the Crucifixion. He also had a round building situated just to the west built above a rock-cut tomb from the 1st century A.D., venerated as the place where Jesus rose from the dead.

By the time the Crusaders entered the once-sumptuous complex more than 700 years later, it had already been battered by neglect and earthquakes, and largely destroyed once during a Persian conquest and later at the order of a mad Egyptian king. The newcomers rebuilt the church in the grand Romanesque and early Gothic style, uniting all three areas into one structure that survives to this day. Western European control of Jerusalem lasted only until 1187, when a Muslim army under Saladin reconquered the city. Though Crusader knights gained brief access to Jerusalem in the following century, the invaders were finally driven from the Holy Land in 1291. They left behind enormous castles and a bevy of churches, but their brutal tactics engendered resentment among the region’s Jews, Muslims, and eastern Christians that lingers even now. After the Crusaders left, the Greek Orthodox reclaimed much of the church, including the Aedicule, the small building sheltering the tomb, and the central nave and high altar to the east.

A devastating fire in 1808 gutted much of the church’s interior. The Aedicule was rebuilt, but but the high altar set up by the Crusaders east of the tomb vanished in the subsequent renovation.

A Greek team of engineers and architects recently restored the Aedicule, which had long been in danger of collapse. In the course of the effort, the construction crew used a crane to lift a two-ton block, referred to as the “graffiti stone” after visitors’ penchant for leaving their mark on it, into a steel cradle, turning it around in the process but relegating it to another dark corner.

Amit Re’em of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, who was monitoring the Aedicule work, spotted the newly revealed side of the limestone panel one day and was stunned by the intricate circles carved into the rock with traces of marble and the rich red stone called porphyry. “It is an exquisite piece of art,” he says. “And it was clear to me that the size of the stone and the unique decoration must be something special.”

Re’em, who specializes in medieval archaeology, immediately went to a Jerusalem library to look for evidence of other stones with similar decorations in order to pinpoint its origin. With the help of historian Ilya Berkovich at Munich’s Ludwig Maximillian University, he pieced together the stone’s strange odyssey, and what it might reveal about the Crusader era.

They discovered that Greek archaeologists in 1969 began excavating in the nave and under the main altar east of the Aedicule, areas that remain in the hands of the Greek Orthodox clergy. Though the results were never made public, a curious Catholic priest reported that the team found Crusader-era remains. Some were covered up, but others, including the rectangular panel examined by Re’em, were removed so that the researchers could access material from the earlier Byzantine era.

Re’em and Berkovich tracked the geometric pattern on the stone’s design to a style popular in Rome in the 12th century. The use of four circles surrounding a central circle, all richly inlaid, was the trademark design of the Cosmati family, Roman artisans who worked for the pope. The stone’s design “symbolized the power, both temporal and spiritual, that the Papacy achieved during the 12th century,” writes art historian and New York architect Paloma Pajares-Ayuela in the definitive book on the style. That suggested the stone was carved and inlaid when the Crusaders rebuilt the church.

“I think that this exquisite piece of art could be evidence for the papal artistic patronage in the church,” Re’em says. “It is proof that Crusader art was highly developed” and reflects the direct influence of Rome on the distant Jerusalem shrine. Most of the Crusader knights were French and German, and there are few contemporary reports detailing the 12th-century reconstruction of the church. The stone panel, he added, suggests that papal craftsmen may have been directly involved in the work.

The two researchers then examined the panel to see where it might have been used. Since the bottom portion was unfinished, they determined that it was not flooring, nor was such a design used in the various tombs in and around the church. Instead, it appeared to have been a standing stone framed by other materials.  “The best answer is that this was the high altar of the Crusader-era church,” said Re’em. Mass was first celebrated on the altar July 15, 1149, exactly 50 years after the Crusaders conquered the city, and remained the site of Eucharistic offerings until the 1808 fire, when it was buried under the new floor, and only exhumed nearly a half century ago and then propped against a north wall of the church.

One European archaeologist, who requested anonymity because of religious sensitivities, explained that the altar’s disappearance reflects ancient tensions. Greek Orthodox clergy, he explained, are more interested in remains of the original Constantinian church than recovering those of the early 12th century, when the triumphant Crusaders for a brief time banished them as heretics from the complex they had long overseen.

One art historian, who likewise requested anonymity, is unconvinced by Re’em’s analysis, noting that some Byzantine craftsmen used similar designs that influenced Cosmati work in Rome. More research needs to be done to determine with precision the maker and precise placement of the stone. Since part of the panel is broken off, Re’em hopes to find the location of the remaining section.

In the meantime, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Armenians, Copts, and Syrians jealously guard their respective territories within the Holy Sepulcher, with Ethopians relegated to the roof. Scuffles among clergy of the different sects is not uncommon, and occasional bloodshed is recorded. Two Muslim families hold the keys to the great Crusader doors to ensure everyone access.

The Greek Orthodox spokesman, Metropolitan Isychios of Kapitolias, did not reply to request for comment on the stone panel, and the scaffolding containing the stone remains parked and unmarked against a wall, just a few dozen yards from its original presumed position on the rebuilt high altar. Now, however, its faded but graceful decoration, a likely reminder of Rome’s fateful impact on the medieval Middle East, can once again be seen.

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Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellows

Working this summer as the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellow in residence, Andrew Lawler is bringing a new perspective to studying the 430-year-old mystery of the Roanoke Colony.

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