Smithsonian Institution scientists have discovered that four skeletons dug up decades ago at colonial Jamestown are among the oldest known remains of African-Americans. The bones, thought to date between 1650 and 1700, were originally classified as American Indian.
Indians were present at Jamestown, the first successful English settlement in the New World, from its founding in 1607. Africans may have arrived as early as 1619. Until now scientists knew of only one other black person’s skeleton of comparable antiquity in the United States, a man whose remains were found years ago at Patuxent Point, Md.
One of the Jamestown skeletons, that of a man in his mid-20s, is riddled with pits and deformations typical of end-stage syphilis. Researchers say the man must have been in great pain and probably suffered severe dementia. The skull also shows that he died of a gunshot wound to the head, possibly the result of a mercy killing.
Douglas W. Owsley, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is to report the new interpretation today at a special meeting of physical anthropologists at Oregon State University in Corvallis, entitled ”Who Were the First Americans?”
The bones Owsley is reporting on were excavated more than 40 years ago, when the National Park Service turned up more than 500,000 artifacts. More recently, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities uncovered the James Fort site and a skeleton of a man believed to be the first settler. The same Smithsonian team of scientists is examining those remains.
Owsley said the African origin of the Jamestown skeletons came to light as he was re-examining ancient human remains in a collection at Jamestown. The National Park Service, which administers the site, had contracted for the study to comply with a federal law that requires reburial of American Indian remains if a Native American group can show they are related to the deceased and if scientific analysis is completed.
”I think this shows that when we use modern forensic techniques, we can go way beyond what we used to do,” Owsley said. He noted that if the skeletons had been reburied, as has happened with other skeletons, the new knowledge would have been lost.
Owsley and other anthropologists are waging a major effort to keep very ancient skeletons from being reburied on the grounds that they are too old to be related to any modern tribe and that as science advances, new analytic methods will be available to reveal new facts about how ancient Americans lived.
The Jamestown misidentifications occurred in 1940 and 1955, when anthropologists noticed that the bodies had been buried in a way not typical of English settlers. And their ”shovel-shaped” incisor teeth was a form once thought to exist only among people resembling modern Asians. It was believed then that American Indians descended solely from such people. So, the early researchers concluded that the skeletons were of Native Americans.
Owsley said he recognized immediately that the skulls were narrower than those of modern Asiatic peoples. A detailed, computer-assisted analysis of scores of measurements of the skulls showed a pattern typical of African men.
It is well established that Africans, some slave and some free, accompanied many exploring and colonizing groups of Europeans in the New World from the earliest days. Historical records show that blacks were living in Jamestown by 1624, just 17 years after the colony’s founding. There is some evidence Africans had been brought to the area as early as 1619. They are thought to have been servants, but it is not clear whether they were slaves.
Martha McCartney, a historian with the National Park Service’s Jamestown Archaeological Assessment project, said all four skeletons had been buried near property owned by two successive sheriffs of Jamestown. The local jail was nearby. She speculated that the man with syphilis may have been so debilitated that he was committed to the jail, a common practice with the mentally deranged in those days.
