Dr. William Kelso revealed “the buried truth” at the historic Jamestown, Virginia settlement at a lecture at the Wisconsin Historical Society Tuesday.
His lecture, “Jamestown: The Buried Truth” outlined Kelso’s discovery of cannibalism in the Jamestown colony.
Kelso, the current director of research interpretation for the Preservation Virginia Jamestown Rediscovery Project, described the fort as a time capsule of colonial life, because unlike most of the original colonies, Jamestown hasn’t grown into a large city, so its artifacts are easier to find and are preserved well.
To date, approximately 1.7 million artifacts have been recovered from the site, including armor, coins, pottery and a piece of slate with drawings of people in the colony, according to Kelso.
While exploring an abandoned cellar, Kelso said his team found hundreds of small animal bones, such as rats, snakes, and dogs. Under ideal conditions the colonists would have never eaten rodents, but they did so in desperation to avoid starving to death.
Kelso said the strangest discovery made in the Jamestown excavation site completely reshaped the current idea of colonial life. Among the animal bones, Kelso said he discovered the human skull of a 14-year-old girl that had over 50 cuts, suggesting the removal of all soft tissue, and post-mortem chop marks that were made to crack the skull and remove the brain.
“I had always thought with Jamestown that some of the things just didn’t quite add up. In the back of my mind I thought maybe someday some archaeologist might look at it,” said Kelso.
The discovery of the girl’s skull was the first evidence of cannibalism in the colonial period, Kelso said. He never took claims of cannibalism seriously because he thought the claims followed an agenda to dramatize the poor treatment of the colonists by the British government.
Kelso said the important discovery answered a question that had always irked him: How did the Jamestown colony succeed, when so many others failed?
Kelso said he thinks if Jamestown had not resorted to cannibalism, the colony would have failed and the British government would have lost interest in colonizing North America, therefore completely changing the course of American history.
