Discoveries at Jamestown offer new view of early settlement

The more than 1 million artifacts unearthed since 1994 at Jamestown, Va., are changing historians' views about the first Europeans who settled the Chesapeake Bay region, a prominent archeologist said last night at the Naval Academy.

Records indicate that 104 men and boys came ashore on James Island on May 12, 1607, and by mid-June, they had already completed a fort. It was the first English settlement in the New World, and suffered a number of setbacks before the colony began to thrive.

"Conventional wisdom about Jamestown was that only gentlemen went who wouldn't know how to survive," said Dr. William M....