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Unearthing Jamestown’s Leaders, and a Mystery

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●  Story in the Virginia-Pilot

 How Archaeologists Dug Up a Human-Shaped Coffin That Wasn't There

One man was thought to be the first Anglican minister in the Americas. Another, an early explorer of the Mid-Atlantic region, was a rival of Capt. John Smith’s. And two of them, kin of Sir Thomas West’s, the governor of Virginia, helped save a colony on the brink of collapse.

All four, some of European America’s earliest leaders, died in colonial Jamestown from 1608 to 1610 and were long thought lost to history.

But on Tuesday, a team of researchers from the National Museum of Natural History and the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation announced that they had unearthed and identified the men amid the ruins of a church on the site of Fort James.

Read entire article at NYT