For lunch with the speaker prior to the lecture RSVP to Peter Feinman, feinmanp@ihare.org or 914-939-9071

Twenty-two years of Jamestown Rediscovery’s excavations have revised what we know about the first permanent English settlement in America, generating multiple international news headlines and filling museums and laboratories with millions of artifacts. The Jamestown Rediscovery archaeology team under the direction of William Kelso with historian James Horn, and forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley in 2015 studied the remains of four of the earliest leaders of Jamestown who had been buried more than 400 years ago in the chancel of the first Protestant church in the new world. The talk will focus on their drive to learn everything they canfrom the Jamestown site before it is swamped.

Marilyn Johnson’s article about the four colonists appeared in Smithsonian magazine last September. The author will share the full story of her work behind the scenes with this productive archaeological team, many of whom have spent their entire careers in thrall to Jamestown. Johnson is also the bestselling author of Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble, which HarperPerennial has recently issued in paperback. The book was a selection of the Westchester AIA Book Club, and she spoke to the group at its meeting. Johnson received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire. She is a resident of Mount Pleasant.