He was dumped in his grave with little ceremony. He had no coffin, no burial shroud and probably no family to mourn him. He had a broken right leg, and perhaps damaged ribs. His right arm was pulled awkwardly across his chest. And his left hand was clenched in a fist.
He had a square jaw, stood about 5 feet tall and was around 15 years old. And when experts opened his nearly 400-year-old grave last week, they realized they were looking at one of Maryland’s first European settlers — and one of the first colonists in what would become the United States.
Travis Parno, director of research and collections for Historic St. Mary’s City, said the young man could well have been aboard the Ark or the Dove, the ships that brought the first permanent White settlers to the shores of the St. Marys River in March 1634. Parno called the discovery “monumental.”
“This is someone who was here in the first years of the settlement, the vanguard of the Colonial invasion,” he said last week, standing by the site near the old Colonial capital of Maryland, about 70 miles southeast of Washington. “Someone nobody wrote about. It’s a period that we have such little documentation on.
“To have the physical remains of a person who was part of that venture, who lived here, briefly, and died here early” is crucial, Parno said. “You wonder … what he came over for … the hopes that he had, the dreams that he had.”
The discovery comes two years after Parno announced that he and his archaeologists had discovered the outline of the lost fort the colonists built after their arrival. It is the earliest Colonial archaeological site in Maryland, he said, and adds to researchers’ understanding of European colonization in the Chesapeake region and its effect on Indigenous residents.
The teenager’s burial was found just outside the location of the fort’s walls.
“I think it tells a fascinating story of how young people helped settle these colonies,” said Kari Bruwelheide, a biological anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “They are oftentimes the ones you find in the grave, and without proper [burial] treatment.”
But what happened to this one is a mystery. Was he injured in a fall? An attack? Or in some other way?
The examination and excavation of the site was conducted by Bruwelheide, Douglas Owsley, a Smithsonian curator of biological anthropology, and Parno and his team of archaeologists.
“This is the face of the English colonists, these first ones, and they are kids, by our standards,” Owsley said.
Bruwelheide said the structure of the face suggested the skeleton was European. His bone structure pointed to his youth. There were no nails indicating a coffin, she said, and the arrangement of his legs showed he had not been tightly wrapped in a shroud.
The position of his right arm was a puzzle, Bruwelheide said. Perhaps he died facedown with the arm underneath his chest, and whoever buried him didn’t, or couldn’t, move the arm back to a normal position.
The smaller bone in his lower right leg, the fibula, was broken. And the larger bone, the tibia, looked cracked or broken, she pointed out.
He probably broke his leg shortly before he died, although that would not have killed him unless it became infected, Bruwelheide said.
Despite his age, he had probably made the weeks-long journey across the Atlantic by himself.
“If he had family here, they would have buried him a little more ceremoniously,” Bruwelheide said. “So we can assume he had no family. He was a 15-year-old boy. A lot of ship crews at the time had cabin boys.” Or he could have been an indentured servant.
The original 150 Maryland colonists included many English Catholics fleeing Protestant persecution.
They bought from the local Yaocomico Indians the land for 30 miles around what is now St. Mary’s City, paying with axes, hoes, cloth and hatchets, according to letters written by a Jesuit priest, Father Andrew White, who was among the newcomers.
St. Mary’s served as Maryland’s first capital and was home to its first State House, but the city was abandoned when the capital moved to Annapolis in the 1690s.
The dig site today is in a meadow about the size of a football field. It is owned by Historic St. Mary’s City, a historic site and museum.
Parno said part of the burial was discovered in 1992 by accident. Earlier archaeologists, digging into what they thought was a fence-post hole, came upon the skeleton’s lower legs.
But the fort had yet to be located, and it wasn’t clear what the burial represented, he said. The earlier archaeologists filled in the grave to protect it from curious passersby.
With the discovery of the fort and the public attention it generated, Parno said, he worried that someone might find the grave and disturb it.
“People see an archaeological dig, they might want to do a little digging themselves,” he said. “It happens.”
For that reason, and with the availability of the Smithsonian’s anthropologists, “we figured this would be a really good time to investigate this burial and ultimately remove it from the property.”
He said the remains would be cleaned and sent to the Smithsonian for detailed examination. Eventually, they will be reburied, probably in St. Mary’s in a suitable location, he said.
As experts photographed and measured the skeleton last week, a breeze rustled a nearby field of yellow flowers.
“It’s been both exciting and nerve-racking,” said Jessica Edwards, the St. Mary’s fort site director, as she stood by. It was the first burial she had excavated. The bones were so delicate.
“And this was a person,” she said. “You don’t want to break anything.”
