Digging in at Fort Raleigh, Roanoke Island

By now you may have checked out some of our first episode.  As someone who spent years excavating at Jamestown and who has studied this period since I was a kid, it was awesome to spend our first Time Team dig at Fort Raleigh with the folks from the First Colony Foundation.  It was also fitting that Time Team America's first show was about one of American history's greatest puzzles.

More than twenty years before the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, adventurous English colonists built Fort Raleigh at the northern end of Roanoke Island.  You've heard the story - when Governor John White returned from his supply mission in 1590, the colonists were gone.

Scholars have been studying the same records for more than a hundred years and have not been able to fill in a complete picture of the first colony. But archaeology can uncover new information about where and how the colonists lived and maybe even some clues to what happened to them.

One thing to remember is that the colonists aren't the whole story.  The English saw America as a virgin land, but that wasn't the case.  Native Americans lived here for more than ten thousand years before Europeans arrived.  The key to knowing our true history is knowing how these two groups interacted.  They left clues behind, and archaeology can find them.

But archaeology takes a lot of time, labor, and money.  Enter Time Team America.  With modern technology and added crew, the team was able in just three days to uncover the first new information in years.  Work will continue at the site to figure out exactly what we uncovered and hopefully find more of what remains.
 
So did we find the lost colony?  Too early to tell.  But hopefully we did find a whole new group of explorers who want to travel the country uncovering the past.  If you liked the first episode, tell your friends.  They can come with us, too.

Eric Deetz is Time Team America's excavation strategist.  He has thirty years of experience in the field as an archaeologist and educator, including more than a decade designing and leading tours at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the new world.