Powhatan's village found?

Reprinted here from the Baltimore Sun:

Normal is how she would have described her life the first five years on the property. It wasn't until September 2001 that Ripley and her husband looked at each other and thought, "Oh, boy, this could be significant."

The Gloucester area had been surveyed in the early 1970s, and local archaeologists were contacting homeowners to see if they wanted copies of field notes from the unfinished project. Ripley said yes. She was sitting on the porch talking with archaeologists David Brown, Thane Harpole and Anthony Smith when they asked to see her collection of artifacts.

When she opened her workshop to show them what she had collected, no one spoke. Slowly, they passed pieces back and forth. It wasn't only the amount of American Indian pottery she had found that amazed them, one of them, Harpole, would say, but the large size of the pieces. Could they be from Powhatan's village? They asked to bring in a friend, E. Randolph Turner III, an expert on early American Indians . . .

When he stepped from his car, Turner was wearing a big smile. The site was exactly what he imagined it would look like, the couple recall him saying. It was a setting worthy of a man who ruled what was then the most complex entity in northeastern North America.

Posted by David on June 15, 2003 9:22 AM