Free Republic

August 18 marks the anniversary of one of the greatest enduring mysteries of US colonial history: the Lost Colony of Roanoke. While the bizarre incident is often dubbed "America's oldest unsolved mystery," we now have a pretty good idea of what occurred (it just took 400 or so years to get a clear idea). In 1587, colonizers from England, ...led by John White, landed on Roanoke Island just off the eastern coast of North America, in what is now Dare County, North Carolina. It was the second attempt to set up a permanent colony, the first having failed two years...

“We found the houses taken down and the place very strongly enclosed with a high palisade of great trees, with curtains and flankers very fortlike, and one of the chief trees or posts at the right side of the entrance had the bark taken off, and five feet from the ground in fair capital letters was graven CROATAN, without any cross or sign of distress. We entered the palisade, where we found many bars of iron, two pigs of lead, four fowlers, iron sacker-shot and such like heavy things, thrown here and there, almost overgrown with grass and weeds.” --...

MERRY HILL, N.C. — Under a blistering sun, Nicholas M. Luccketti swatted at mosquitoes as he watched his archaeology team at work in a shallow pit on a hillside above the shimmering waters of Albemarle Sound. On a table in the shade, a pile of plastic bags filled with artifacts was growing. Fragments of earthenware and pottery. A mashed metal rivet. A piece of a hand-wrought nail. They call the spot Site X. Down a dusty road winding through soybean fields, the clearing lies between two cypress swamps teeming with venomous snakes. It is a suitably mysterious name for a...

MERRY HILL, N.C. — Under a blistering sun, Nicholas M. Luccketti swatted at mosquitoes as he watched his archaeology team at work in a shallow pit on a hillside above the shimmering waters of Albemarle Sound. On a table in the shade, a pile of plastic bags filled with artifacts was growing. Fragments of earthenware and pottery. A mashed metal rivet. A piece of a hand-wrought nail. They call the spot Site X. Down a dusty road winding through soybean fields, the clearing lies between two cypress swamps teeming with venomous snakes. It is a suitably mysterious name for a...

It's one of the nation's great mysteries: The first permanent colony of English settlers in what would become the U.S., founded in North Carolina in 1587 by Sir Walter Raleigh, disappeared three years later with virtually no trace. Now, archaeologists hope a new search for the Lost Colony will unearth clues about what happened to 117 men, women and children who vanished and were never seen again. The First Colony Foundation, a group of archaeologists, is partnering with the National Park Service for a series of digs beginning this week at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. "This dig includes...

A new look at a 425-year-old map has yielded a tantalising clue about the fate of the Lost Colony, the settlers who disappeared from Britain's Roanoke Island in the late 16th century. Experts from the First Colony Foundation and the British Museum in London discussed their findings Thursday at a scholarly meeting on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their focus: the "Virginia Pars" map of Virginia and North Carolina created by explorer John White in the 1580s and owned by the British Museum since 1866. "We believe that this evidence provides conclusive proof that...

Who Really Discovered America? Did ancient Hebrews reach the shores of the North and South American continents thousands of years before Christopher Columbus? What evidence is there for Hebrew and Israelite occupation of the Western Hemisphere even a thousand years before Christ? Was trans-Atlantic commerce and travel fairly routine in the days of king Solomon of Israel? Read here the intriguing, fascinating saga of the TRUE DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA! William F. Dankenbring A stone in a dry creek bed in New Mexico, discovered by early settlers in the region, is one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries in the Western...