It’s a news story that contains the ingredients of a paperback thriller, the sort of thing that reminds readers what they find so evocative about archeology. Researchers sifting through the ground at America’s first permanent English colony at Jamestown Virginia discovered, atop the coffin of one of its prominent members, a green-patina-covered box mysteriously emblazoned with the letter “M.”
An electron microscope revealed that the still unopened box contains several shards of bone—seemingly evidence that Captain Gabriel Archer was entombed around 1609 with some sort of relic. Evidence of crypto-Catholicism here in what was presumed to be a uniformly Protestant colony.
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