- I don't know whether Ive or Noel Hume has ever been shot at by natives with poison darts or evil Nazis with rifles.

Somehow, I doubt it, but his work as director of Colonial Williamsburg's archeological research program has been every bit as exciting and materially more rewarding than the work of Indiana Jones.

In the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, carefully working with trowel and Whisk broom, Mr.

Noel Hume and his allies have uncovered for us a 17th century plantation known as martin's hundred.

Their discoveries have variously revised and enriched our understanding of this country's early days.

Iver Noll Hume.

My guest on this edition of Tim Morton's Tidewater Noel has described his five-year excavation at Martin's a hundred in a new book.

And I must say the new book reads like a good detective story.

The book is entitled Martin's a hundred.

Noel, I got the impression reading this book that you are a very, very fortunate man.

You combine your vocation and your hobby, don't you?

- I do indeed.

Yes.

- I was particularly thinking about your talking in the book when you went to the Yucatan in Mexico and discovered a kiln that were in Mexico.

Saw a kil in Mexico that related to one that you thought might be at mar on martin's hundred.

- Yes, we did, because we had no idea what we were looking for down there.

In fact, it was in the backyard of a hotel where it was turning out fake antiquities to sell to the tourists in the hotel.

But the thing about it was that this was a structure standing on the land surface.

And we hadn't found, we'd been looking for a pottery kiln in martin's hundred, and the reason we were looking for it was we'd found waste products from it, but we didn't find the structure at all.

And we knew or thought we knew that kilns should have channels going into the ground, which although the super structure would disappear, those channels would survive and we should find them.

Well, we didn't, and I was fussing over why we hadn't found it.

And then I saw this kiln in Yucatan, which was the same shape as pictures of kilns that I'd seen in England from the 17th century.

And so I asked these people how, how they fired it and so forth.

And it turned out it had no foundations to it at all.

So it just sat on the land surface.

And every few years they pulled it down, started over.

And so I worked around and looked to see how many bits of, of debris from previous kilns were around there.

And I could find virtually nothing.

And it suddenly occurred to me.

But the reason I wasn't finding anything was perhaps because it was like this Mexican kiln.

It simply stood on the land service when they were through with it, they toyed apart and it just didn't leave anything in the ground for archeologists to find.

- And then you related it to pictures of contemporary time, pictures from the - That's right.

Period.

That's - Right.

That's interesting how you use paintings and pictures from the time constantly.

I found that fascinating, both in the television program and in the, in the novel and then in in the novel.

It's supposed to be true.

It like it it supposed to be true.

It reads like it.

- Oh dear.

Ain't a novel, folks.

- I know.

It is.

- Well, the, the idea about of course, the pictures is that we want to see what the other fellows saw.

- Yeah.

- And when you have in the after there are photographs, you couldn't take a photograph and you see what the fellows saw through the viewfinder.

So what we are tried to do, the best we can manage is to go to contemporary painters and say, what did you see?

And the trick, of course, is determining whether they're really seeing what they were painting.

And so you have to learn an awful lot about the painters to find out whether they plucked it outta thin air or whether they had a set of studio props as some of them did.

- Yeah.

- Or whether they really went out into the countryside.

And when they drew a barn door, was that barn door really in the same relationship to a window of a, of a real barn?

Or was it just simply they did, they did their door and they did their window and they slapped them together and you don't get a real barn at all.

Those are the kinds of things that you have to pursue.

So we follow the, we have to read all we can about the painters and go back to their original sketchbooks.

'cause the sketchbooks are usually more accurate in the paintings.

- That's must be fun.

- It's lot of fun.

- Yeah, sure.

- Oh, it's detective - Story.

It's like a novel here.

It's, and this was an odd kind of archeological excavation that you all were doing now, here you were, you were in Williamsburg and you were going to find out information on Carter's Grove.

That's the beautiful mansion that Williamsburg has now taken over King Carter's mansion from the 18th century.

And you went exploring into the 18th century and began stumbling into things in the 17th century.

And, and, and you mentioned even one part of the book that you went out kind of hoping you wouldn't find something one day because this was in a wrong century.

- Yeah.

Well, what really happened was we acquired the property, or Colonial Williamsburg, a crowded property in 1969.

And as we have done for us in since the 1920s in Williamsburg, we restore the property and put back the outbuildings and things that have vanished from the old houses.

And so we wanted to do the same kind of thing with Carter Grove.

And it lost most of its outbuildings, its slave quarters and things had barns.

And so were all gone.

So we were sent down there, the Department of Archeology was sent down to try and find these lost buildings.

And we had 520 acres to hunt for the mountain.

And part of that was swamp.

Part of it was woods.

Part of it had been plowed over for generations.

So it was a very difficult task.

And so we simply did testing all over the property.

Sometimes with trenches, sometimes just little holes.

- You're looking for post holes?

- Well, we were looking, no, at that point we couldn't really think we could find post holes.

It'd be nice if we hit 'em.

But what we were really looking for were artifacts, bits of pottery, bits of glass, clay pipes, anything that had been scattered on the grand surface because the stuff stays more or less where it was dropped.

It'll move a little bit to the left as it's to plow it over this way.

But you'll plow it back the other way a little later on.

And so you'll find this stuff in the plow zone even.

We look at down groundhog burrows where they see they're spoil thrown up.

Or when a tree is turned over in the woods, you look through the root systems to see if anything's left hanging up in there, sort of free looks, you see?

And so while we were hunting for the 18th century, we kept falling into a previous century into the 17th century.

And that wasn't the mission at the time.

Colonial Williamsburg was not interested in the 17th century.

And so the things were simply plotted and left.

Well, we hit some graves adjacent to a parking lot on near other mansion.

And we figured at the time we found them, this would be 1971, that they were probably slave graves.

And the reason the rationale for that was that the family graveyard was over to the west, and the kitchens in that area were over to the east.

And therefore graves that were adjacent to the kitchens were most likely to be slave graves.

And we didn't want to interfere with 'em.

And so we simply backed off.

And then we moved another part of the same field and worked across the field.

And then we hit more graves and we backed off.

Then we, so we attacked the field from the north and came down.

Then we hit some 17th century rubbish pits.

And I didn't wanna mess with those.

So we backed off from that.

That left about an acre and a half to two acres that we hadn't touched.

And so in 1976 when the bicentennial was going to be this great, exciting thing that it wasn't ever quite, Yeah, when we were gonna have millions of peoples flooding the peninsula, colonial burg thought it was gonna be swamped with people in town and needed a sort of safety valve.

And the idea was to put exhibits at Carters Grove.

But at that time, we'd only recently acquired the property.

The only thing that we'd got down there that was new was an apple orchard.

And to invite the public to come down and watch the apples grow wasn't all that exciting.

And so they said, well, we'll move some of the activities from town down near the mansion.

And the obvious place to put these activities was near the parking lot.

And near the parking lot was where I got these wretched graves.

So they said, will you please go down there and just find out really how many there are?

We'll honor them of course, and, but we'll stay away from them, but find out how old they are and just tell us about how long will it take.

So I said, well, I think we could probably do that in a month or so.

Well, four years later, what we found was a layout of an early 17th century plantation.

The graves were not slave graves at all.

They related to the colonists who'd come over in the 1620s and 1630s.

And it was a very important find.

But as I mentioned, we were finding fragments of pottery and waste products from a kiln.

And we got to the end of the season and hadn't found the kiln.

And what happened then was we should have packed up.

And Colonial Willers wanted us back in town.

We, we'd started on this plantation.

Of course we had to finish it, fortunately for us, but not for Colonial Williamsburg.

The millions never showed up.

And so nobody bothered us through the summer.

And so we worked there.

And then at the end of the season, we were due to go back to Williamsburg and get back to the business of the 18th century.

And Dr.

Melville Groner, who was the chairman emeritus of the National Geographic Society, came down to stay at Colonial Williamsburg.

And he was actually supposed to come the next week, but he turned up a week early.

And so I got a call from the front office saying that we have to sort of vamp till already, you see, until we pretend that we really were expecting him.

He said, so I got asked was, are you doing anything interesting?

Which when you think about it, it is pretty insulting.

'cause I always thought I was always doing something interesting.

And so I said, well, no, but we have finished the excavation, but I could of course show him the slides of what we've found.

I said, you do that.

So down comes Dr.

Groner.

And I show him all this stuff.

And I thought he'd gone to sleep.

I mean, he just sort of sat there and said, I didn't say anything at all.

And so, and I got through the presentation.

I said, well, there it is, you know, and waited for something, nothing.

So I thought I better go and turn the lights on.

As I was going back across the lecture room, he put out his hand and said, what about the kiln?

I said, well, you mean we never found the kiln?

Said, well, you can't stop now.

And I said, well, we, we are through, we are out of money and so forth.

And he said, well, the National Geographic are Saudi back.

Assure sho you will be help you out if you'd care to go on.

Ah, nice man.

How terribly cognitive to say that, Cesar.

And so they underwrote a second season.

And then we went on and we still didn't find, we never found the kil, but we found all sorts of other things.

Now - Was is this, was this the time when you began to begin to realize this might be the Walston home?

- No, no.

Well, we, we had done some, we had done our homework by then.

Yeah.

So when we started, we hadn't done the homework - At all for the documents.

- We'd done this work of the documents.

We now knew there was such a place as Walston home town.

I'd never heard of it before that, which is hardly surprising.

- But it was the highway marker, - The, I didn't mention it, but not Walston home tower.

It mentioned That's - Martin only the slaughter.

- Yeah.

It just simply said that there was, the engine uprising of 1622 had destroyed the tower.

The settlement of martin's hundred - Right.

- Killed 78 people.

They said on a plantation that was covered 80,000 acres.

Those, both those figures turned out to be wrong.

But that's really all we knew.

Yeah.

So, but during the, my wife, who is our research historian, was, began to assemble information as we always do on the site.

We preferred to assemble it to start with.

But this, we sort of backed into this one.

And so we then knew that there was such a place as Walston hometown.

- Yeah.

- And we figured it ought to be somewhere nearby, but it obviously wasn't where we had been digging.

And I had found on, our crew had found some other sites deep in the woods to the downstream from the Carter's Grove mansion.

And we thought that that was probably it.

But what happened was that in the middle of the summer, well, early, late May, early June, we got attacked by the flies in the woods.

And the crew decided they were going to quit rather than carry on being chewed on by the, by the, the flies.

They were deer flies.

And so I said, all right, well we'll leave the woods for the summer and we'll go down to another of the sites that had turned up in the early testing near the river, because the prevailing wind would keep the flies off it.

So we went where the flies weren't.

I had, I had my brother, we would've gone into deeper into the wards where I thought Woolston home was, well, I would've been quite wrong.

I also had a lot of chewed on people too.

And so we went down where, where the flies were not, which turned out to be where Woolston home was.

And so then we went on, we found a corner of the fort, and that was the end of that season.

So the National Geographic then said, we will go on for another season.

In fact, they went on for two seasons after that and financed us throughout and provided opportunities to publish in a popular way.

And the publication, of course, scholars wanna see large bar graphs and all those sorts of things that are immensely boring to the average person.

But that all comes later.

We, we do that later.

But what we needed was really get people interested, make people care.

'cause that's what archeology is about.

Yeah.

If you dig it up and nobody cares, you might as well leave it alone.

'cause every time you dig anything up, you destroy it.

- Was it the post holes that you found and, and the, and the, and the fact that there was this big settlement here was that was what began to convince you it was Wilson hometown?

- Well, we found a corner of something that looked like a fort.

- I see.

- And we knew from the documents that it was a, the two sides of this, they were rows of post holes coming along like this.

Yeah.

And they came to a box like structure.

Yeah.

Structure.

And this was an angle of 72 degrees, which suggest it was going think was gonna be triangular.

And my wife went back and read the early documents about the fort at Jamestown, which was triangular.

And it described how the placing of the posts and the rails and the pales were fixed up.

And I thought, my heavens, what we're, what they're reading here could be a description of this.

So is it possible that the town of Wolfsten home lies inside a fortification in the same way it did at Jamestown?

And so that's what what we were thinking at the end of 1977.

In reality, it turned out the fort wasn't nearly big enough for that.

And it's some lay at the back of the, of, of the settlement in the way.

- And it wasn't designed particularly well, as I recall.

- Well, the fort wasn't designed all well, it was trap oid.

That means that every side is a different length.

Every angle is different.

- Yeah.

- That's what I described.

I I, at one point, I was designed by somebody trained in the, why don't we stop about here, school of Military Engineering.

And that's really what it was pretty sloppy thing.

- Yeah.

- But it'd lay at the back of the town.

It had one gun in PLA platform, which was not to fire on Indians.

That was to fire on the Spaniards who were, or the Spaniards were the bogey man, not the Indians as far as the English were concerned.

That's interesting.

They never, the English really didn't, weren't ready for what finally hit 'em.

They always thought it would be the Spaniards.

So it was the town lay outside.

You see in the history of, of the development of, of protective dwellings, you have either kind of walled town.

- Yeah.

- And Jamestown was a walled town.

All the houses inside the Palisade or you have the idea of the castle, medieval castle with the tenants houses all outside like chickens sitting round a hyn.

- Of course, this goes back at the medieval - Times - European cities.

Yeah, - That's right.

So you have, it's either one way or the other.

You either have everybody an open town custard around the defensible castle.

That usually means that when attack comes, all the tenants houses get destroyed except the the nobles house, which is inside the fort.

And so you stand there and watch the smoke pass and say, well, sorry folks, go out and rebuild.

That is not really a satisfactory from the po point of view of the public as actually being inside the fort with your houses.

Jamestown was, was thus protected when the Indian uprising of 1622 occurred because the town was inside the fort.

And because Jamestown was warned - Yeah.

- By a friendly Indian the night before.

The Indians never attacked it.

But the other towns which were open, some with no, and really they weren't towns at all.

They were just simply small clusters of of - Small.

How many people were at Wilton hometown?

40.

- Well, we figured were probably never more than 30 or four.

It it, the town itself was an administrative center for a large plantation of, of 20,000 acres and more.

And the people who came over were servants of businessmen in London.

In this particular case, in some cases, they, plantation owners themselves, obtained the share bought shares in the Virginia in small companies, secondary companies set up by the Virginia company in London.

- And neither Wolfsten home nor Martin ever came.

- No.

Did they they No, no.

They, they were just, they were on the letterhead.

That's all they were.

Wolfsten home liked foreign exploration.

He was involved with the East India company with William Baffin explorations and the, for the Northwest passage and that sort of thing.

And Henry Hudson's Ill faded expedition.

He put up money for all these things.

And what he got in return was some sort of satisfaction, I suppose.

Vicarious satisfaction.

They called themselves.

He - Didn't make any money out of it.

Did, did he?

No, but he - Always thought he might.

- Yeah.

- But he got his name on the maps.

And so he, his name survives in various places around the world, rather unattractive places.

As a matter of fact, he, he has a, a sound in off Greenland and he has a little island uninhabited off Greenland.

And he has a, a, a cape at the entrance to Hudson's Bay, all rather chilly places.

He did have a bay in Bermuda, but, but they got his name.

So fouled up through the 18th century, they said, well, that, they call it it.

So anymore, - I do want you to tell me the story about granny.

And this is one of the main episodes in your book when you discovered her and she discovered her kind of later in the, in the excavation.

Yeah.

- We had - You called this woman - Granny.

We called her granny because she'd lost her lower molars.

She really was only about 35, 40 years old.

Although that was relatively old in those days.

In those days when life expectancy was about 30, She, we found her lying in a rubbish pit.

I should explain that many of the houses and much of the plantation of martin's hundred was destroyed in the Indian uprising.

Yeah.

And the Indians burnt the houses.

They killed the people, chopped them up and, and did rather nasty things by our standards.

And we found a sort of outwork, what I call a suburb of Fulton hometown, quite separate from about 500, 600 feet away.

And in a rubbish pit outside this little palisade compound was this skeleton of a woman lying on her side with one hand up to her head like that.

And the other lying across like this.

And she had her back against the edge of the pit.

And she had her on her head a wire frame, which had been bent back round one ear.

And we could find no other signs, evidence of clothing.

But it was just this strange thing, which we didn't first of all understand at all.

What it was is called a hair roll.

- Yeah.

- And you, the hair was rolled over this thing and it was characteristic of the early 17th century.

Yeah.

Can see in - Pictures of Queen Elizabeth.

- That's right.

That's sort of thing.

Well, we won.

That wasn't the world she was doing there.

We felt that she was a victim of the Indian attack.

'cause after, why would she be lying in a rubbish pit and not in a grave - On her side?

- And first of all, I thought she'd been thrown into the pit.

And then I caught flu and woke up, woke up on several occasions, found myself lying like that.

I thought, heavens, that this is a natural way of sleeping.

So I called the pathologists at the state medical examiner's office and said, is this likely?

And they said, yeah, yes, certainly is.

And in fact, people who die of exposure go into a state of natural sleeping relaxation.

And we then got in touch with a man who was a specialist in sleep at the Payne Whitney Institute.

And he described this as a standard sleeping position.

The legs slightly flexed and say, well, so here was this lady asleep in the rubbish pit, which was even more odd.

Well, - The answer to me, you must remember now, this is la this lady is actually, this is, these are the bones of what?

250 years ago?

- Well, yes.

More than that.

Yes.

- 300.

Yeah.

- 350 years ago.

Excuse me.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

And so we figured that what had happened was that she had, her home had been burnt.

We found that the posts of the remains of the house were, were burnt.

We figured that she crawled away had been, we suspected attacked by the Indians because this harrow thing had been wrenched back around her head.

And that what we'd previously found another skeleton of a man who had a scar, which started here in cutting the burn.

It went from here to here.

And we figured that a scalp lock had been taken by cutting like that and pulling back, which makes that would make that kind of scar.

This is not my unsupported opinion.

Dr.

Lawrence Angel, who was the head of the physical anthropology department Smithsonian, looked at this and felt that this was probably so.

So this man had been, had, his head was damaged on the left hand side.

This lady had had the hair roll pulled away to expose the left side.

And we felt that probably they'd taken the hair off.

Now that doesn't necessarily kill a person.

You can get your headquartered in machinery and that sort of thing and will survive.

But we feel that she probably crawled away suffering from loss of bladder in terrible state of shock.

- Yeah.

- And hid in the pit.

Now there it was on the age of a ravine, which should have taken her down to the river.

But it's highly likely, I would think that the Indians were already down there.

And so she simply hid waiting for 'em to go away.

And there she simply being cold, cold weather.

And we've checked several years that we have been able to check back and see just what the average temperature was.

- March 22nd.

March 22nd.

That's right.

- And we have checked over the years, March 22nd, to see just what the temperature range can be.

And it is within a range in which a death by exposure can occur.

- Yeah.

- And particularly if the pit was wet and it'd been, it had been snowing and that sort of thing, and she was cold and wet.

But you go through this period of wellbeing and sense of that all is well.

In fact, people throw off their clothes when they're about to die of exposure.

And so we felt that she'd simply lay down there and never woke up.

And then as the winter and summer came, the spring rains washed the clay down over her and the weeds started to grow and nobody ever found her.

- What are you gonna do now?

What are you gonna doing now with the material that you've found that, - Well, we're still doing really very intensive research on Are you gonna put it - On display for public?

- Eventually?

We hope to.

Eventually we must.

- Yes.

- We'll, everybody beating us on the head.

We don't.

And we want to because the artifacts are tremendously exciting.

However, the artifacts just by themselves are sort of dead.

This, and this is the thing that one has the opportunity to write books and make television programs and things like that, which try to bring these artifacts to life.

Yeah.

You talked about paintings.

- Yeah.

- Well, to be able to see the kinds of people that they were, the faces of people and how things were used.

Particularly if there are things that haven't changed Very much so that people of today can say, well, I have things like I know I do that well immediately.

Then there is a bridge between the past and the present.

And that's what our job is to try and create this kind of bridge.

- I have read in another one of your books about your feelings about amateur archeologists.

You have strong feelings about this.

Yes, I do.

Feelings not like your, - Some, - Unlike your colleagues.

- Well, there has been over the years, a tendency to downgrade the amateur sometimes with justification.

People who don't understand how objects relate to the ground.

Take the object and leave the ground.

- Yeah.

- But people are being trained nowadays, much more intensively.

College university courses in historical archeology are spreading all over the country.

The problem is that there are going to be more so-called professionals, people wanting to get paid for the, for, for doing archeology than there are jobs to do it.

And with the current economic situation, we see cutbacks on those kinds of cultural programs.

And so we're gonna be looking much more to the amateur in the years ahead.

And I see this as an advantage.

The am the, the young professional coming out and not getting a job doesn't see it as an advantage at all right now.

But in the long haul, I think we're going to see many people going into perhaps more legitimate jobs, banking and all those sorts of useful things who have an education in archeology and want to do something with it.

In the past, there hasn't been any way of getting an education.

So you, your interest in it came from out of yourself.

Your own desire to, to have, usually to possess, but to reach out to the past in a rather undisciplined sort of way.

Now the people are being taught the, the discipline of archeology.

And they are going to be the, the, the amateur backbone of the future.

And we, I think we - And you think they're important?

I think - They're terribly important.

We start want to be embracing them now and looking that way for, particularly in the, in our own area here, we've got a lot of good people, a lot of university courses.

I think the future, not economically, but the future for archeology itself is pretty bright and exciting.

- I wanna compliment you on your book.

It's, it's fun to read.

You've got two levels going on at once.

You, you, you describe your, the, the work that you all did and the team did.

And you're following that at the same time.

You're following and learning through your eyes this history of 350 years ago.

And you're trying to create you, you help us create that in our head at the same time.

Two levels, two mysteries sort of going on at once.

It's, it's a very nice job.

Very nifty job of writing.

You did - Well, thank you.

It was really just a record of what we did.

'cause we were finding it out as we went along.

- How did you do it?

You, you, you've got the, the book is so complete.

You must have kept some sort of record during the - I kept pretty extensive - Notes.

- Yes.

We have day books and things in the field, which tell us what the weather is and who's getting sick and things like that.

And I would be able to draw on that brings in the sort of human element of it.

But what I do is when something interesting is happening, I write it up myself.

Not in a scientific way, but in who said what and who came by and what our ideas, however stupid they may be, how they developed and how they were thrown out.

And it really is cuing from that kind of information that one puts together a book of this sort.

- My compliments to you too.

You're going to have be an alternate selection of the Book of the Month Club and also the history, history book club.

That's true.

Right?

That's nice.

What book is this of yours, Noel?

This is what is about the eighth, sixth, seventh.

Sixth.

- This is the 13th.

- 13th book.

Yes.

That's probably terribly unlucky, but it's not accounted for all those th you you've done other books other than Yeah.

Tell me about that.

- Well, I, I also do some novels under other Oh really?

I would have to probe you about that - Sometimes.

Not today.

Okay.

Tell me a little bit about, I've got one minute.

What are you going to do?

What are you, are you still digging?

Yes.

Martin Center.

- Yes, we are.

- What are you, what are you looking for?

Right.

- We are working on the A site or around the perimeter of a site that we're talking about in the book.

Which one?

Which starts in the 1645 period goes to about 1710.

It's a sort of what we call a missing link in the history of Carters Grove.

Because the Carters Grove mansion starts in 1755.

- The - Martins hundred story ends in 1645 or thereabouts.

So this plugs right in the middle.

And we're working on that.

We don't expect to complete that excavation now.

We're trying to preserve part of the site for future, for use, future investigation.

But we are working there.

- Good.

And I enjoyed your film very much too.

I probably will be shown on channel 15 again, I think.

I hope so.

Thank you very much for being my guest tonight.

Thanks.