On a hot and humid afternoon last week, a Bobcat 5600 vehicle used a sophisticated radar that looked like a bush hog farm tractor attachment to try to find artifacts near the main gate to the Lost Colony's Waterside Theater on the northend of Roanoke Island.
In addition to the data the radar tomography amassed, yet another dig is planned for this fall as the quest to find out what happened to America's first colony continues.
This time last summer, the archeology group, First Colony Foundation and its radar sub contractor, had some success on the site. During a dig they uncovered a copper necklace in the wooded, sand dunes not too far from the theater.
It was an exciting time to see it "in situ," said foundation archeologist and co-director Eric Klingelhofer.
The necklace is on display at the Lindsay Warren Visitor's Center located in the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, which encompasses the visitor's center, the Lost Colony and Elizabethan Gardens.
"The copper necklace was just put on exhibit," Jason Powell, park ranger said. "It's the first time in public."
He said the park service also plans to create an improved exhibit with renovations beginning in the fall.
"Hopefully by next year, we'll have more artifacts on display," he said.
Additional items found last summer such as beads and a pottery shard also are scheduled to come back to the Roanoke Island after undergoing conservation measures in Jamestown, Va.
Powell said the neatest thing about the necklace is not knowing much about it.
"Automatically, it makes people have more questions," he said. "[It creates] new excitement in the possibility of finding more."
The Venetian bead and delftware pottery shard will be cleaned and cataloged before their display at the visitor's center, Powell said.
Venice was one of the great glass manufacturing centers during the time period of the Lost Colony and glassware was used for trading by Europeans who took them oversees to the New World, Africa and elsewhere, Klingelhofer reported.
This fall, another dig is scheduled and perhaps some underwater excatation may take place behind the stage of the theater.
As Powell discussed the future of the projects, Jim Driscoll operated the radar machine as he carefully drove across flat land near the old fort site just outside of the theater enclosure.
The radar - a sound frequency at 200 megahurtz - goes into the ground and reflects off of things such as tree roots or other anomlies such as artifacts from the Lost Colony, Driscoll said.
The box that contains the radar is eight feet wide and covers huge, overlapping swaths of land at one time. He takes the raw data, processes it and eventually views it in Quick Time movies where it looks like at cat-scan.
"Then, you can peel off the first inch or twenty-four inches," he said. "Then you're looking twenty-four inches before the surface - it's faster than digging."
Driscoll and his crew from Craig A. Smith and Assocates out of Ft. Lauderdale, were covering from two to four acres last Wednesday, July 22. It was hard to measure how much ground they were covering because of "the tree and fort were in the way," he said.
His company was hired by the First Flight Foundaton with permission from the National Parks Service.
Watching the workers that afternoon was Klingelhofer, a history professor at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. He said the foundation is a North Carolina organization dedicated to finding and learning about the first colonies, he said.
They hope their research will in turn allow them to educate the public about what happened to the Lost Colony. The other co-director, Nick Luccketti, works in colonial history in Virginia, hence the Jamestown location for artifacts' conservation process.
Klingelhofer said the day they found the copper necklace was exciting. The English knew native Americans treasured copper so colonists often traded it.
"Part of the team was there - the necklace was right on the egde of the excavation in situ," he said. They had to quickly ask the park service to let them go out of the dig area, and he mentioned they had to cut down a tree to retive the necklace.
That's when the tooth brushes and camera come out, Klingelhofer said with a smile.
He called the necklace "a startling, new find."
Klingelhofer also said that the glass bead and everything else will return to Fort Raleigh in good time.
"The glass bead will be back; everything will come back," he said.
