Wow, what a day :-)

Wow, what a day, the weather was perfect and I headed down to the Citie of Henricus Historical Park in Virginia, USA for their day of reenactments.  For those that didn’t know, when I chose to pursue my diploma in maritime archaeology in Europe the founding reason was when I took Comparative Colonial Archeology under Marley Brown III at William and Mary I noticed some fundamental assumptions which nagged at me and seemed contradictory to the logic of colonial archeology in Virginia.  One of those was the presumed dominance of the British.  During the founding of the Virginia Company and before the ideas and techniques of a continental nature influenced the charter members, many of whom had worked in the garrison towns in the United Netherlands.  When Jamestown was established in 1607 the Dutch had already formed a massive maritime network based upon cooperation and free trade.  It was the free trade with the “New World” that when questioned by the British Navigation Acts of the 1650’s caused the Dutch to go to war.  Archeologists have often found continental artifacts in their assemblages.  I have a fascination with the Dutch trade with the New World.  I wanted to know how the German stonewares, Italian glass beads, French gunflints, and whole other sections of artifacts of continental origin made it into Virginia; questions I thought best answered by studying at the source.  Were they coming in on boats that called British ports home? or as with sites in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific were they being brought in by ships flying the flag of the United Netherlands?  There was trade influenced by the Dutch, Germans, French, and Swedes in Virginia, but to the average tourist our later ties with the United Kingdom overwhelm that history.  Now that I have returned to Virginia, I see that while at first we were insignificant to the global economy as we grew and established new trading partners we ceased to be a small controllable “company” but something far larger and indistinct from the rest of our trading partners.  It is the story of America, but our story is one that is linked to the rest of the world.  In 1607 the investment into the Virginia Company was a gamble.  A gamble that took years to bear fruit.  In 1619 the Falling Creek Iron Works opened up, and iron ore was created from limonite formed by chemical deposition in our boggy coastal waterways processed by the colonists using the bloomery process.  This ore found its way once processed into ingots to British buyers, but as tobacco our one cash crop that even Europeans think about when Virginia is mentioned found its way into other hands.  In 1622 the bulk of tobacco production by the Virginia Company was sold to merchants in the United Netherlands.  The Virginia Company had to fight for this option with the British Government over its charter rights.  I leave you below with some pictures for thought from the day at Henricus.  I hope you like them as much as I do J

A collection of replica trade goods...traders in the colonies established first relationships with the local aboriginal populations in Virginia by trade of small items such as brass and copper scraps as well as glass beads and other items.

A snaphance musket, by 1619 as much as half of the shoulder arms fielded by the Virignia Company were flintlock by the surviving historical documents. 

A group of reenactors at Henricus Historical Park at Dutch Gap Virginia, USA with matchlocks, snaphances, and other small arms.