Fort Raleigh, also known as the Roanoke Island colony, is today a public park owned by the U.S. Government and tended by the National Park Service. The first program from Time Team America was presented on the lost colony of Roanoke Island.
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The original English expedition to the "New World" was sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh and arrived at Roanoke Island in 1584. In 1587, a colony of about 116 men, women and children were left there, while the expedition's leader John White returned to England to fetch additional supplies. Delayed by politics and war, White returned in 1590, only to discover that the colonists had vanished, apparently willingly but without trace. The only clue to the location of the vanished colonists was the word "Croatoan" carved into the fort's gatepost, the name of a nearby Native American group that had been friendly to the English settlement. But the colonists were never found, and it is unknown where they went or what happened to them.
Archaeological investigations were first conducted on Roanoke Island in the 1950s by J.C. Harrington. A fort was rebuilt on the basis of the evidence revealed in those excavations; evidence recovered since then suggests that fort is in fact not the original fort but a second one dated to the 18th century. In 1991, the esteemed scholar Ivor Noel Hume discovered the science center for Fort Raleigh, a building separate from the original fort where colonist-scientists Joachim Gans and Thomas Hariot smelted local copper.
Online Resources
- Time Team America: Fort Raleigh
- Time Team on About.com
- First Colony Foundation
- Fort Raleigh, National Park Service website
- Handbook of the History of Fort Raleigh
- Joachim Gans, Jewish Pioneer, by Gary Carl Grassl
- America's Lost Colony: Can New Dig Solve Mystery? 2004. National Geographic News.
See the bibliography for more resources
