Most people have heard of the utterly baffling story of the "Lost Colony," the early English settlement in Virginia/North Carolina that completely vanished sometime before 1590:
The colony's founder, John White, departed for England in 1587; he returned three years later to find more than 100 colonists simply gone:
The word CROATOAN and the letters CRO, carved into trees within the colony's borders, were the only signs pointing to an explanation. Despite the clues, the returning crew was unable to search for the missing colonists; a storm approached just as they came upon the desolate settlement, forcing them to turn back for England.
Though long suspected to have ventured to "Croatoan Island," now Hatteras Island, the fate of the colonists has never been satisfactorily explained.
But that may have just changed:
Recently, a closer inspection of Governor John White's map, La Virginea Pars, revealed two faint outlines that appeared to be repairs — small pieces of paper had been used to cover an error. Under advanced lighting techniques, experts discovered that one of these patches concealed a symbol of a fort, which could indicate the intended location of a new settlement.
Here's part of that map:
'I said to Alice, "I think we just discovered the predicted location for the City of Raleigh, the colony for which John White was sent to Virginia,'" said Kim Sloan, a British Museum curator who made the discovery with her colleague, paper conservator Alice Ruhamer, according to Mail Online.
Now, the mere planned location for the site of a potential city in the New World might not, at first glance, tell us much about the fate of the colonists.
But the location of "Site X" offers more compelling evidence than that:
In 2007, archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti of the James River Institute for Archaeology discovered pieces of English ceramic artifacts at Site X. These artifacts included fragments of Border ware, a specific type of English pottery that had been restricted to the early settlements in Virginia, probably dating from the sixteenth century. The find suggests that archaeologists had stumbled upon a previously unknown English settlement.
Fragments of English pottery dating to 16th-century Virginia settlements?
Archeologists have also discovered "an early type of aglet (the metal tip of a shoelace), and a tenter hook (a nail used to secure cloth over a wooden frame)."
Based on these discoveries, the First Colony Foundation concluded that there was an English presence at Site X that could only have come from the Roanoke colonists
The First Colony Foundation "plans to continue investigating Site X in search of more evidence of English presence there and any clues that could provide more information about what happened to the inhabitants of the lost colony in 1587."
We'll keep a close eye on this one!
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