“Climate change is affecting all kinds of sites, including some extremely nationally significant sites like Jamestown,” said National Trust Senior Policy Director Jim Lindberg. “Climate change doesn’t pick and choose.”
Organizations like Preservation Virginia and Jamestown Rediscovery are acting fast—and approaching the issue from multiple strategic angles—in order to rescue these cultural resources while they still can.
“The threat is significant enough that measures to overcome it, to address it, need to include a full spectrum of possibilities,” said Lindberg.
Rediscovering Jamestown
Preservation Virginia—a nonprofit that operates Historic Jamestowne through a public/private partnership with the National Park Service—established the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project in 1994. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the prevailing theory was that the 1607 fort was fully submerged under the James River, which flows adjacent to the site. But starting in the 1960s, William Kelso, a professor from the College of William & Mary, began to question this story. He had evidence to support a new idea, that the remains of James Fort were still above the water line.
After convincing Preservation Virginia of his theory, the organization supported Kelso in launching the Jamestown Rediscovery project, and his team began excavations in April 1994. They soon had gathered enough archaeological evidence to definitively prove that the dry land surrounding a surviving 17th century church tower was, in fact, the original site of James Fort.
