"Archaeologists Discover Remains of First British Settlers in America"

This article has been found to be entirely spurious and the product of a malicious group operating from Tel Aviv who describe themselves as "American Zionists."  pl

"The female skeleton has been identified thanks to DNA testing, as Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas. The DNA of the skeleton which was found in October, was compared to that of modern day descendants of Governor John White, her grandfather. The test confirmed that the bones were indeed with more than 99.8% certainty, those of Ms. Dare. Four of the others corpses have also been identified through the same process by the scientists, including that of the girl’s father Ananias Dare, a tiler and bricklayer from London. The other identified skeletons are those of Arnold Archard and his son Thomas, as well as the young John Sampson. The last two skeletons have not been identified yet, as the researchers were unable to collect any valid DNA samples from the skeleton."  Worldnews

--------------------------

The nice Indians, innocent children of the forest free, born in Rousseau's "state of nature" kept slaves?  Surely that cannot be. 

It is amusing to read some of the comments on this article.  The efforts to absolve the Indians of the sin of slaveholding are pathetic in their self deception and naivete.  The basic argument for that effort is that the Indians were nice slaveholders unlike the bad White slaveholders both North and South of a later day.  These nice Eno Indians, could, of course, have freed their British captives any time after the establishment of the Jamestown colony, but they did not.  The skills of the captives were useful and so they kept them.

The Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies are usually spoken of as though they were the first substantial contacts that the East Coast Indians had with Europeans, but that is not the case.  European fisherman had been in contact with the Indians on a regular basis for a long time.  The cod fishery was well exploited and the fishermen habitually set up "factories" ashore to prepare their catch for shipment home.  That contact had disastrous results for the Indians who contracted what we would consider to be mainly "childhood diseases" that killed most of the members of the east coast tribes. 

Some Indians sailed back to England, Portugal, etc. with the fishing fleets, and later returned to America.  At Plymouth several Indians walked into the colony early on seeking employment.  They all spoke English having learned the language from the fisher folk.  pl  

http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/usa-archaeologists-discover-remains-of-first-british-settlers-in-north-america/

Comments

[BabelFish]

Ah, my college degree in Anthropology and focus of study in archaeology finally becomes useful!!

The whole 'good Indian, pure environment' movement is such utter garbage. Read (or listen) to the book 1491 for an eye opener on what the Americas were like before the Europeans had a major impact. Slavery, torture, conquests, massive environmental changes and, yes, very sophisticated civilizations.

A point that always amuses me. Poor white tail deer. We've done them so much harm! Well, as we excavated native sites in New England, we all finally came to a common question. Where the hell are the deer bones? Answer: there weren't very many because there weren't a lot of deer. Either that or the local tribes sucked at hunting. The real answer, of course, is that the environment at that time, with cathedral forests and the lack of a deer buffet in the way of European horticulture and ornamental shrubs, plus actual predators, meant there were far fewer deer around.

[bth]

Col. I had researched this amazing article a little further when it came out last week. I am always suspicious of WND. Anyway I haven't found confirming reference from something like National Geographic which had covered the settlement's story more comprehensively last year. Also the states referenced seemed off. Let's look for some more confirmation of this fascinating discovery.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Tell the supporters of that Gucci-wearing lama about slavery in Tibet before the Godless Chinese Communists moved in and put an end to it.

[oofda]

This may not be correct. I couldn't find anything else on this story, other than this piece that says it isn't true.

http://factually.gizmodo.com/no-archeologists-havent-found-the-lost-colony-of-roano-1676146740

And this from last year, suggests a number of possibilities.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131208-roanoke-lost-colony-discovery-history-raleigh/

However, your premise about the Indians being "good slave holders" is correct. Having grown up in Sioux/Lakota and Ree/Arikara territory, I often heard of slaveholding by the tribes in the 'old days.' A famous contemporary book is found in the book "Slave of the Sioux". This is the account of a woman held captive by Indians, Fanny Kelly, who, as part of a band of emigrants on their way to Idaho in 1864 with her husband and young daughter was captured by the Sioux in a brutal and deadly massacre, spending the next 6 months enslaved by various factions of the Oglala & Brule tribes.

Another interesting book is "Kidnapped and Sold By Indians" the first-hand narrative of the life of Matthew Brayton. He was kidnapped in the early 1800's and held for much of his youth. A review of the book states: " lthough Brayton’s treatment was not entirely negative or positive, his frank and blunt story does much to dispel the romantic stories that have been perpetuated about young settlers’ children who became Indian chattel. It does much to tell true history and dispel any deliberate or accidental revisions." Of further interest, is that during the Civil War/WBS, he enlisted and served in an American Indian brigade.

[DC]

Interesting. Just one more example that it's human nature to exploit labor if you can get away with it. Hence, Laws. Also, it's not like the Natives were completely unrelated to the Euros and their innate ways. Recent DNA analysis of (northern) Native Americans shows significant percentage of Native heritage came from what eventually became western Europe stock. The rest came from the precursors of modern native Siberians, apparently.

[turcopolier]

all

This lost colony story may be a hoax. i will leave it up util we can conform or dent. pl

[Piotr, Poland]

Are you sure it was really slavery?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Tibet_controversy

[nick b]

All,

I poked around a little on this story because it seemed so interesting, and it involved my alma mater: Johns Hopkins University. The first thing I noticed was that the article was said to come from Lanford, in Laurens County, North Carolina. But Lanford and Laurens County are in South Carolina. Perhaps it was just a typo. I was also unable to find a Professor William J. Monroe at JHU, or anywhere else. Similarly I could find no record of Ms. Karen White, Director of Public Relations of JHU. Surely the University would have mentioned this discovery somewhere, but I was unable to find any such announcement. The last mention of the research from the Roanoke Colony was from an article in the Alumni Magazine about alum Ms. Lee Miller who wrote a book entitled 'Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony'.

http://pages.jh.edu/~jhumag/1101web/roanoke.html

Finally I saw the 'gizmodo' article that oofda linked to above.

This makes for a great story, but based on what I was able to discover, I don't think it's true. I could be wrong. I certainly have been before. But in this case, I don't think so.

[nick b]

All,

A couple more things I found. The picture at the beginning of the article is actually an AP photo of remains unearthed in London during a rail line project.

http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Britain-Black-Death/d471537a35df4258ab556cbaecb5dd1d/15/0

The picture of the artifacts said to be found in the article is actually a picture of artifacts found during construction on the South Street Seaport.

http://www.ny1.com/content/news/186840/construction-project-by-south-street-seaport-turns-up-colonial-era-artifacts

And Lastly, the photo in the article that appears to be a panel of archaeologists, is taken from a panel at the 'Recharging the Youth Conference' at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation this past April.
Picture #21 of 24 at the bottom of the page.

http://www.snf.org/en/initiatives/recharging-the-youth/recharging-the-youth-conference/

[James Penland]

All,

We Americans who trace our roots to the British Isles often think the first settlement in the South was at Jamestown and the land to the West and South was unbroken wilderness. That is incorrect.

For decades before the English arrived, the Spanish had established permanent missions all along the Southern Seaboard and in Florida.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_missions_in_the_Americas#Georgia

The North American Indians had an extensive trading system that linked to many of these Spanish outposts in Florida to the French outposts in Canada and to the Indians of the north and middle Atlantic.

Thus, by the time Plymouth and Jamestown were established, the knowledge of the European was probably quite widespread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Trail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Woodward_(colonist)#Trade_with_Chattahoochee_River_Indians

As the eastern United States was settled, the settlers did not cut brush through unbroken forest to get around, they walked on a centuries old system of trading paths through the neighborhoods of the native Americans.

I live in a county in Metropolitan Atlanta of 271 square mile that, prior to the coming of Columbus and the decimation of the native population by European diseases was populated with an estimated twenty thousand farmers, farming fields of corn, beans, and other native crops. There likely are more trees in the county now than then.

My neighborhood lies on the Shallowford Indian Trail, a part of a trail system that ran from the coast to Tennessee where it connected to the Great Indian Warpath. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Indian_Warpath

I have often wondered what the life of an itinerant Indian merchant was like and what customs allowed free passage of goods between tribal territories.

[nick b]

All,

Apologies for the many posts. As you might have guessed I've little to do today. I think I finally got to the bottom of this story. If you look closely at the link, this 'story' is from "world news daily report . com", not to be confused with (or maybe that's the whole point) "world news daily".

From World News Daily Reports' disclaimer:

"WNDR assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles of this website - even those based on real people - are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle."
http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/disclaimer/

Also this: http://realorsatire.com/worldnewsdailyreport-com/

I think we can stick a fork in this one.

[turcopolier]

All

I will leave this up for a while. I see now that the groups responsible labels itself "An America Zionist" group located in Tel Aviv. I fail to understand what it is that they thought they were doing in fabricating this other than to mock the United States. pl

[kao_hsien_chih]

The sentiment of "pure Indians" echoes the peculiar "Roots"-ization of West Africa circa 16th-17th century, where there were quite sophisticated and thriving civilizations whose prosperity depended in part on export of...slaves, who were not their own people but captives of war, criminals, debtors, or whatever it is that got them enslaved according to their laws. The kind of myths sold by American political correctness gang used to really rile West Africans, who were reduced to backwards and simple minded folk (and still pops up when they talk about some of their historic sites, the bustling ports from the heyday of their civilizations...which American blacks are too eager to condemn as places of evil.)

[Haralambos]

nick b,
There is no need to apologize! You seem to have nailed this dead.

[different clue]

Colonel Lang,

In this getting-stranger age of false flag, false-false flag and false false-flag flag attacks and posts getting mixed in with the true flag ones, could this be from third-party tricksters under a false Tel Aviv label?

(A growing number of internet experts are suspecting that grudge-hackers attached a false North Korea label to their attacks on SONY) . . .

[different clue]

Babak Makkinejad,

Considering what the Han Chinese have done/ are doing to Tibet from then to now and into the future, " ending slavery" sounds more like an excuse than a true boast on the ChiCom regime's part.

[Babak Makkinejad]

One can mock them back; cooking up a story about the non-existent pottery shards with the name "slmn bin dvd" on it, found in Syria.

[Haralambos]

This is very interesting to me. Thank you. I recall reading a great deal about contact languages in the new world while I was a colleague of Prof. John Holm at the Universidade de Coimbra in Portugal. I also grew up in upstate New York on the "border" of the British and French settlements on the Hudson River with Fort Edward, Lake George and Champlain waterway allowing movement with portages in the day.

In my attempt to be off-topic, I will add that I think more attention to history and the geography associated with it in schools might be an improvement over the disputes over the so-called common core.

[different clue]

Colonel Lang,

As I read the article more slowly I find a couple of things inconsistent with literary first-language fluency in American english. "The" "John" Hopkins University for Johns Hopkins Universtity? The caption below the photograph of the professors says " The team of scientists from John Hopkins University have performed every possible test and analyze on the bones" etc. etc. The team "have" performed . . . ? "Have"? not "has"? Again . . "John" Hopkins University? Every possible test and "analyze"? not "analysis"?

"The University based in Baltimore has already been contacted by many museums interested in purchasing their discoveries" . . . "Their" discoveries? Not "its" discoveries?

Plus also too some of the words are separated by two or more spaces where one space would be the right number of spaces.

So whoever wrote it is not entirely fluent in written American English and is not a professional grade writer. I can't think of why any pro-Israel writer would want to risk offending us by writing a piece of gratuitous mockery. That makes me wonder whether a counter-Israel writer or group would write this under Israeli (or American Zionist cover) to get us to think we were being mocked by Israelis or an American Zionist group. If it really is by Israeli or American Zionist persons, then they have a psychological problem of some sort.

[LeaNder]

Thanks for the links, James.

'Amazing' what strong emotions the article triggers:
"What amazing news! I have wondered about the Lost Colony since studying it in grade school and then seeing the play in the Outer Banks as a small child. My mother was a genealogist and traced one of our lines back to Chief Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas. This is so exciting!"

When guns, settlers and armies meet bows (not to mention the obvious "clash of cultures") there no doubt are dead, wound, mutilated and captives.

I was curious about the variants and thus the transmission history of Fanny Kelly's story (mentioned above) or the larger context and history of the slave narratives and ended up here:

The Indian Captivity Narrative 1550 - 1900 in fact and fiction:
www.amstudy.hku.hk/PDF/engl55_kj_derounian_indiancaptivity.pdf

[jr786]

Disappointed to hear it was fake; I thought a great mystery was finally solved.

Still, you were right to publish it Col., even considering the source - after all, you have to take a Dare.

[Booby]

All,

The article in the post is one of the many theories of what happened to the survivors of the lost colony.

After finding a few arrowheads on a retirement property in south-central SC, I did a bit of research to find what Indian tribes had lived in the area. I was surprised to learn that there had been 24 tribes in SC when the English arrived in the Charles Town area.

The initial trade between the Indians & the English was for slaves for the Charleston plantations. Unfortunately for the English the slaves offered by the Indians were women & children. I assume that the warriors died fighting or were killed if captured. The English imported male African slaves from the Indies.

While I'd always heard that the early settlers found full canopy forest covering the land, the south western part of SC was quite different. According to early journals, it was a treeless prairie covered by cane. There were herds of thousands of buffalo. Deer & other game was plentiful. Large areas were hunting grounds for the Cherokee. The Cherokee & the English had a thriving deer hide trade with as many as 70,000 hides a year being packed down the Cherokee Trail to Charleston.

The initial whites coming to the area were free range cattle drovers grazing their herds. The English began giving land grant to other emigrants. My family's grant was astride the Cherokee Trail & it was stipulated that the settlers had to provide food & shelter to the Indians transporting hides to Charleston.

Col., interestingly one of the groups of settlers in this area were a group of French Canadians who were being transported to Louisiana. Their ship was crippled by a storm of the Carolina coast. The stranded Frenchmen were given land grants in south central SC near McCormick.

The purpose of the vast land grants offered to foreigners by the English was to create a buffer between the Cherokee nation & the English coastal settlements.

[LeaNder]

It's interesting that the larger topic leads straight into shared colonial values. From this fence looker's perspective.

Anti-Americanism = Antisemitism Markovits' Neoconservative Twin Brother's:
http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-markovits-06.htm

Not quite as complex no doubt, way back in history - English versus French versus Spaniards versus Indians, dominantly of course the Puritan Founding Fathers --all neatly woven into the larger enemy narrative of threated, burned, killed, mutilated true believers-good versus evil-on one side; Israel against the Arabs/Persians on the other.

Hmm, maybe the Persians help? Makes it more complex than the purely "the Arab mind" narrative or collective "larger Arab enemy".

Did the French indeed stir the ransom business of American/Canadian natives with captures Europeans?

The old question of sources:
http://tinyurl.com/RH-sources

I wish I were young, the captives - slaves narratives in their historical context look rather promising, but complex, needs firm historical grounding, just what I loved. Lots of space for theses. Propaganda and/as to quote my above linked spiritual friend "politics of memory"? ... To what extend are emotions our own? ...

But honestly?

WorldNewsDaily - "About us":
"Our News Team is composed of award winning christian, muslim and jewish journalists, retired Mossad agents and veterans of the Israeli Armed Forces."

"Award winning" journalist, in the art section that means descending to the lowest no-name level, you need an attributes. Always made me sick that trick. Really?

OK, strictly I could subscribe with a US provider just as Tel Aviv "award winning" journalists could. But why should I, if I out myself as Tel Aviv based in the end?

I remember a lot of these enterprises in the post 9/11 world popping up and disappearing again. Pretending to be Iraqi voices communication versus providers in the US. ...

The question is if they think that "retired Israel Mossad agents" apart from the "award winning" no-names will do the trick, and pull crowds, and it is simply about advertisement????

***********

A horse for the answer, apart from the question to Pat: has the game already started? Was this meant to be a national memory game?

[oofda]

Colonel,
It is pure arrogance. Especially in light of yesterday's vote at the UN Security Council regarding Palestinian statehood. The US carried the water for Israel- the Israel Ambassador to the UN and the #2 (DCM) were not even in New York, but in Israel- they were so confident of the US doing their work for them.

[Dismayed]

@ different clue
"I can't think of why any pro-Israel writer would want to risk offending us by writing a piece of gratuitous mockery."

I don't think they are in the slightest worried about offending us. The Zionists completely own our eminently rent-able whores in Congress and what the little people (you and I) think is profoundly irrelevant. This is exemplary of the difference between ascendent 'rightist' Zionism and the old 'leftism' version. The latter were always more circumspect in their dealings with us, keeping up appearances so as to avoid riling up or awakening too many Americans at once. The former don't see the necessity and even, I suspect, see the act of trying as an indignity.

"... a piece of gratuitous mockery."
You nailed it. That's exactly what it is. They (Zionists) despise us for being so weak and gullible. I don't really blame them. Harsh reality: we are.