Visit | Historic Jamestowne Visit the real thing at Historic Jamestowne, explore the actual location and active archaeological dig, Jamestown Rediscovery, home of the first successful English settlement.

Ready to get out of the house yet? Head to Jamestown to explore the history of Virginia Indians in the Tidewater region, the Jamestown colony, and 4,000 artifacts in the Archaearium Museum!

Plan your visit at historicjamestowne.org/visit

Holiday hours notice! We're closed Thanksgiving day (Thursday, November 27). Historic Jamestowne is open regular hours every other day and we have a great slate of programs scheduled for the weekend! Get the full schedule and pre-purchase admission at historicjamestowne.org/visit.

Tickets for our annual "At Christmas be Mery" program are selling fast! If you want to create a new holiday tradition with your history-loving friends or family, join us under the stars for a 17th-century celebration. Get your tickets before they sell out at historicjamestowne.org

What's on your wish list this holiday season? What about a one-of-a-kind artifact-inspired gift from Jamestown?

The coasters are designed using patterns from Delft drug jars excavated right here at Jamestown. Shop now at https://historicjamestowne.org/shop/main/

Jamestown archaeologists uncover centuries-old donkey tooth The finding adds to a growing body of research about animals at the famous 17th-century settlement.

During the Starving Time, settlers turned to taboo food sources, including horses, vermin, and eventually, cannibalism. A new addition to that list: a donkey.

WHRO covered the discovery at https://www.whro.org/arts-culture/2025-11-12/jamestown-archaeologists-uncover-centuries-old-donkey-tooth

Jamestown Rediscovery is recruiting volunteers! If you love history and sharing it with others, we could use your help at the Fort site or in the Archaearium Museum. Explore volunteer opportunities and submit an application at https://historicjamestowne.org/about/volunteer-program/

State grant will help fund Jamestown project researching escaped slaves JAMESTOWN — The foundation that oversees preservation efforts at Historic Jamestowne recently received a state grant that will help it better tell the story of escaped slaves who came to Jamestown …

State grant will help fund Jamestown project researching escaped slaves trib.al/azwXmoy

With only three of these little mounts in our collection (including this one), it's likely they were all attached to the same object or set of objects belonging to one person. The collections team will do more research on who that person might be! Stay tuned.

The mount takes the form of a mythological bird called a martlet. The martlet doesn't have feet (just feather-pants!) and cannot land. In heraldry, it was often associated with the fourth son, who did not inherit any property and was forced to "fly the coop" and make it on his own.

Here's another #FridayFind from the 1607 burial ground! Last week, archaeologist Natalie found a Martlet Mount (or tack) in a large posthole above the burial ground.

https://historicjamestowne.org/collections/artifacts/martlet-mount/

More research is definitely needed! A maker's mark could help us figure out when and where the coin was made. And (if you enjoy a tongue twister) the weight of the weight will give us a date, but all those details will be catalogued after the coin has been cleaned and conserved. Stay tuned!

French coins (and other foreign coinage) were not uncommon in 16th and 17th century England and coin weights were made in both the country of origin and the country where the coin was used. So it's possible this coin weight, though made for a French coin, was actually made in England.

It's been a while, but it's Friday which means we have a #FridayFind for you!

This is a coin weight! Coin weights were used to verify the authenticity of a coin. This one is for a French coin, called an Ecu d'Or. It was excavated from a posthole that cut into the 1607 burial ground.

You may need to zoom in on this one. 🔎Caitlin found this teeny bone die in the palisade trench she excavated over the 1607 burial ground!

Why is it so small??? Find out on our website: https://historicjamestowne.org/collections/artifacts/dice/

A new episode of our Dig Deeper series is out now! Learn about the excavations in Smithfield this summer. Watch now and don't forget to subscribe at https://youtu.be/id5ink8zcrk

Only 2 more sleeps until Virginia Archaeology Month starts! Join us Saturday to kick off the festivities with Archaeology Day: explore excavations of a 17th-century cellar, go on a walking tour, and see artifacts brought to life through living history.

Plan your visit now at historicjamestowne.org

If any recently engaged people are looking for wedding band ideas, how about something historical!!

This posey ring is inscribed with "As endless as my love" - rather lyrical, don't you think?

Lots of artifacts excavated this summer came from Jamestown's early years as a historic site and have been a fascinating look at the people who helped save this important place.

This bottle is a unique triangular pickle-style bottle, which essentially means that it has a wide mouth, and could have contained cucumber pickles, or other types of pickled goods. It was mold blown with a hand-finished rim. If you want to look it up, the design patent number is 35,956!

Using these details, Senior Curator Leah Stricker found that the bottle was produced in Zanesville, Ohio by the Kearns-Gorsuch Bottle Co. The patent for the bottle was applied for by Charles H. Hess on July 26, 1901, and (as the base of the bottle indicates) was approved on August 20, 1901.

Wait, what? It's true! This summer, field school students found several fragments of a triangular glass bottle. Most exciting, this bottle was dated! The bottom is inscribed "Patented Aug 20 1901."

More than 120 years ago, someone at Jamestown dropped their jar of pickles. 🥒

Because a huge amount of dirt was moved around to build the earthworks, we've found a lot of artifacts while excavating there. Learn more at historicjamestowne.org/archaeology/...

This camera element may have been used at Jamestown as the Civil War-era Fort Pocahontas was being constructed, or by a Union soldier who was present on the island after Fort Pocahontas was abandoned.

This one is marked with the number 16, indicating that the aperture hole measures 16mm in diameter. Today, most cameras use an iris diaphragm to select different f-stops to change the amount of light used when creating a photograph.

This metal plate was excavated on 6/20/2005 - just over 20 (we initially typed 10 🙃) years ago exactly!

Found in the Confederate earthworks, this is a Waterhouse stop. Invented in 1858, a photographer would carry a set of these to control the amount of light that enters a camera.

Explore more iron artifacts on our website at historicjamestowne.org/collections/artifacts/material/iron

The pit was was probably filled in by 1630, and like many other features excavated on the site, contains trash that the colonists discarded during the first quarter of the 17th century.

The artifact looks like a blob of iron but x-raying it revealed that it's chain mail! It was excavated in 2001 from a feature identified as a possible borrow pit for clay, likely used to build early mud-and-stud structures at Jamestown.

In the lab, conservator Don has been working on identifying UFOs 👽👽👽. No, not those UFOs - these are Unidentified Ferrous (iron) Objects! Corrosion frequently makes iron artifacts difficult to identify, so we end up with a lot of UFOs in our collection.