Jamestown Settlement Galleries
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James VI of Scotland,
Adrian Vanson, circa 1595.
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The Jamestown Settlement galleries provide a setting for one of the most varied collections of objects relating to the nation’s beginnings in 17th-century Virginia. The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation collection has been developed to support the museum’s storyline and includes objects representative of the Powhatan Indian, European and African cultures that converged in 1600s Virginia.
“We’ve acquired artifacts to illustrate the way of life of 17th-century Virginians and the three parent cultures, where they came from and how they adapted to new and rapidly changing circumstances,” said Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation Senior Curator Thomas E. Davidson. Artifacts are acquired through gifts from private donors.
The non-archaeological portion of the collection is comprised of objects made mostly in Europe and Africa, including ceremonial and decorative objects, portraits, maps, books, engravings, furniture, ceramics, glassware, cookware, navigational instruments, apparel, toys, tools, and weapons and military accouterments.
Benin copper alloy plaque, ca. 1600,
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Among several rare artifacts that have an especially significant role in telling the story of 17th-century Virginia and its cultural antecedents are a portrait of King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) dating to about 1595 and a bronze plaque depicting in relief an official of the royal court of Benin, West Africa, dating to about 1600.
The skill of West African craftsmen as well as African contact with Europeans is reflected in a pair of bronze bracelets from Benin whose decorations include stylized pictures of Portuguese soldiers, and an Owo carved ivory bracelet, an example of an object highly valued by European collectors.
The only known portrait of Thomas West, third Baron de la Warr, the governor credited with saving the Jamestown colony from abandonment in 1610, is exhibited near a portrait of his wife Cesellye, Lady de la Warr, who was one of a few women investors in the Virginia Company of London. A portrait of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, one of the largest stockholders in the company and Lord Chamberlain to King James I, also is exhibited along with portraits of other Virginia Company investors.
Two fine pieces of furniture, a cupboard dating to about 1600 and a scriptor, or writing desk, a new type of English furniture that appeared in the latter part of the 1600s, highlight an assortment of chests, chairs, stools, tables and beds.
Among military objects on exhibit is an early 17th-century bronze long-barreled cannon, or saker, made by Thomas and Richard Pitt, whose family produced guns for three successive British monarchs. “Sacars” are included on a list of guns in Virginia in 1608.
The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation owns several important collections of Virginia Indian archaeological artifacts representing all chronological periods of occupation in eastern Virginia. A selection of the nearly 60,000 pieces in the E. Edward Bottoms and James R. Coates collections of Virginia Indian objects, including projectile points, stone axes, tools, pottery and European glass beads used for trade, is exhibited in the galleries.
A brass buckle, brass spoon bowl, shark’s tooth and partial
pipe bowl with a stem from the slave quarter site are
exhibited in a section of the Jamestown Settlement
galleries that addresses the status of African-American
slaves in Virginia at the end of the 1600s.
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A vast collection representing at least 50 distinct archaeological sites spanning 10,000 years was donated in 2010 by the Governor's Land Foundation to the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. The sites are located at the confluence of the James and Chickahominy rivers. Objects from the two of them - an early 17th-century Paspahegh Indian town, the closest Powhatan community to Jamestown in the earliest years of English settlement, and one of the earliest known slave quarter sites - are on exhibit.
Additional archaeological material from Virginia Indian and 17th-century English colonial sites, courtesy of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, is exhibited throughout the galleries. Numerous artifacts from the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation collection, including military items, objects for using and storing tobacco products, glassware and ceramics, are displayed next to matching archaeological pieces.
Thirty objects from the Ambundu culture of Angola are exhibited courtesy of the Mercer Museum of the Bucks County Historical Society in Doylestown, Pa., in a diorama representing the Ndongan culture of the first known Africans in Virginia. The Ambundu were part of the Ndongo kingdom in the 16th and 17th centuries. Collected in the early 20th century by Swedish American scholar Amandus Johnson, the Ambundu artifacts are similar to the weapons, tools and personal items used by 17th-century Ndongans.
More than 500 artifacts in all are exhibited in the Jamestown Settlement galleries.
Read about The West Africa Trade and Beginnings of English Manilla Manufacture and
A rare 17th-Century Cannon Exhibited at Jamestown Settlement.
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