From the Washington Post: Anthropologists studying remains from the Jamestown settlement have reported a troubling discovery:
The first chops, to the forehead, did not go through the bone and are perhaps evidence of hesitancy about the task. The next set, after the body was rolled over, was more effective. One cut split the skull all the way to the base.
Oh. That’s disturbing. Someone with “more experience” was presumably working on her leg.
Or so the theory goes…
That cannibalism occurred during the colony’s “starving time” was never in much doubt. At least a half-dozen accounts, by people who lived through the period or spoke to colonists who did, describe occasional acts of cannibalism that winter. They include reports of corpses being exhumed and eaten, a husband killing his wife and salting her flesh (for which he was executed), and the mysterious disappearance of foraging colonists.
Oh my.
Then we have the 14 year old girl. Her remains were discovered in a debris-filled cellar.
The skull, lower jaw and leg bone — all that remain — have the telltale marks of an ax or cleaver and a knife.
This story’s going to haunt me for a while. It’s one thing to suspect this happened in Jamestown, it’s quite another to view physical proof of it. To go from imaginary to concrete… wow.
Her bones were unearthed last August as part of the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project begun in 1994. About 18 inches of fill remain in the cellar, so it’s possible more of her skeleton will be found. Enough of her skull exists, however, to imagine what she might have looked like, using CT scanning, computer graphics, sculpture materials and demographic data.
Her remains were evidently treated like trash:
The girl’s bones were found mixed with those of a horse, dogs and squirrels — testament to the extreme food sources the colonists turned to that winter. They were part of the trash collected in a fort-wide cleanup and dumped in the cellar before the arrival of the colony’s governor, Lord De La Warr, the following June.
To be fair, her actual cause of death us unknown.
My thoughts? I hate it when a Stephen King-like story turns out to be true. This makes reality even more frightening.
