Seeds Sow Ideas about Jamestown
Seeds four centuries old, found in a well at Jamestown, are sprouting new clues about the early days of the Jamestown Colony.
The seeds were mainly from food plants native to the area such as berries, cherries, persimmons and grapes. Most intriguing to archaeobotanist Steve Archer are the implications of three tobacco seeds, including one undamaged specimen dating to 1611, preserved by the wet, anaerobic conditions in the well.
Archer, an adjunct instructor in William and Mary's anthropology department, is employed by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He said undamaged tobacco seeds are a comparatively rare find in archaeological digs and a determination of the species of the lone tobacco seed might reveal evidence of the initial American cultivation of what became Virginia's first profitable crop.
The wild native tobacco growing in Virginia, Archer said, is Nicotiana rustica, a variety with a much higher nicotine content than the Nicotiana tabacum strain, brought to the James River region from the West Indies by John Rolfe, the colonist who later married Pocahontas. The native rustica tobacco was valuable to the indigenous population, but was too strong and coarse to satisfy the growing cravings of the expanding European market. Rolfe's imported tabacum variety became not only the basis of his personal fortune, but also the basis of the viability of the Jamestown Colony.
"The question," Archer said, "is how well developed is the commercial production of the tabacum species in 1611?"
Archer took the tobacco seeds to William and Mary's Surface Characterization Lab at the Applied Research Center in Newport News where lab manager Amy Wilkerson and her team put the 1611 seed under their HIROX 3-D digital microscope to compare it with a known tabacum seed from the early 20th Century.
Surface characterization comparison proved inconclusive and Archer said that DNA testing may be next for the 1611 seed.
National Geographic magazine is funding the Jamestown archaeobotany study.
By Joe McClain for Ideation magazine
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