Jamestown excavation unearths four bodies — and a mystery in a small box

[n2doc]

JAMESTOWN, Va. — When his friends buried Capt. Gabriel Archer here about 1609, they dug his grave inside a church, lowered his coffin into the ground and placed a sealed silver box on the lid.

This English outpost was then a desperate place. The “starving time,” they called it. Dozens had died of hunger and disease. Survivors were walking skeletons, besieged by Indians, and reduced to eating snakes, dogs and one another.

The tiny, hexagonal box, etched with the letter “M,” contained seven bone fragments and a small lead vial, and probably was an object of veneration, cherished as disaster closed in on the colony.

On Tuesday, more than 400 years after the mysterious box was buried, Jamestown Rediscovery and the Smithsonian Institution announced that archaeologists have found it, as well as the graves of Archer and three other VIPs.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/jamestown-excavation-unearths-four-bodies--and-a-mystery-in-a-small-box/2015/07/27/0bb51cb8-2a59-11e5-a5ea-cf74396e59ec_story.html?hpid=z1

[Hekate]

1. KnR -- fascinating

[Warpy]

2. If I had to take a wild guess

the reliquary was saved from one of the wealthy monasteries closed by Henry VIII, taken by a closet Catholic and possibly given to the Jamestown expedition as a guarantee of their safety and prosperity.

They just buried it with the person who had either brought it or relied most heavily on its magic. Everyone else was likely quite disillusioned by that time.

The relics of the time were a huge scam by monasteries, one reason Henry allowed them all to be shut down, money and land being the others.

[Hal_____]

3. Relative?

Yes, that's a good guess about it being saints' relics although the other possibility I could consider is the bones of a relative.