Dr. Eric Klingelhofer, vice president of research for the First Colony Foundation, is sitting on a camp stool on the north end of Roanoke Island in a small section of the Elizabethan Gardens that has been closed for safety reasons for years. It is an area of the island that has faced significant erosion for some time.
In his hand is a small thin piece of metal that is clearly drawn wire. The shape is circular, and it is difficult to say what it was originally — maybe a ring, or perhaps an earring.
Whatever it may have been, it is indeed tiny, yet its potential significance is far greater than its size.
This little ring of copper came from one of the archeological pits that surround Klingelhofer, pits that are searching for Roanoac, the Native American Algonquin village that Sir Walter Raleigh’s first expedition to Roanoke Island encountered in 1584.
The volunteers, who had been digging at the site for a few months, had already found a lot of charcoal from fires and some sherds of pottery.
“Sherds are for pottery. Shards are for glass. That’s the archeological rule,” Klingelhofer explained.
But that little round piece of copper, there’s only one way it could have gotten to Roanoke Island and there is only one place that it could have originated.
“That is drawn wire,” he said, pointing to the ring. “That’s from the English.”
The Spanish and French, he adds, were too far away from Roanoke Island in the 16th century to have left the ring at the village. The ring was almost certainly brought to the New World as a trade good. For the native peoples copper was rare and to be cherished.
“They treasured it. It was actually spiritual,” Klingelhofer said.
The value was akin to the European concept of gold or precious jewels, with a chief using copper as a reward for exceptional valor or service.
“Chiefs awarded their warriors who were successful, just like a European king had to reward his knights, “ Klingelhofer said. “They could take small kernels that might have been found, and they could pound them and make them flat and then they could use them for other things.”
Although it was valuable, the Native Americans were a neolithic culture, Klingelhofer said, and they did not have the knowledge of smelting copper — melting it and turning it into a thin wire.
The ring was found in a layer of dark earth about three feet down, beneath a layer of compact sand, and that’s significant.
In 1769, a horrific hurricane struck North Carolina making landfall probably on Sept. 7 at Southport. In New Bern, the storm devastated the town with a reported 12-foot storm tide. It then tracked almost due north, striking Williamsburg, Virginia the next day.
As it passed over eastern North Carolina, “there was a terrible loss of life and animals drowned…” Klingelhofer said. Waves ravaged the shoreline and at Roanoke Inlet, directly across from Roanoke Island, the combination of wind, waves and storm pushed huge waves and vast amounts of sand onto Roanoke Island. And that sand is the key to identifying when that small brass ring was dropped to the ground.
He points to one of the pits where the color difference between the sand and darker soil is striking.
“What we have is surviving evidence that has been buried beneath the sand. This is very easy to see,” he said. “That sand dune that was not here in 1587. This whole sandy area occurs, we believe, after the great hurricane of 1769.”
Indicating the dark soil beneath the sand, Klingelhofer described the significance of the darker soil.
“That’s the original topsoil in the woods here, the fields here and for the villages here, and we find the same thing all along where it has been preserved by dunes. You’ll find it all the way up along the coastline to the Fort Raleigh earthworks,” he said.
Which means anything below the sand almost certainly predates 1769, and according to Klingelhofer.
“There is no evidence of Algonquians or other tribes living on Roanoke after the 1500s,” he said. His observation adds to the belief that the copper ring came from that first contact between the English and the indigenous peoples.
Klingelhofer is considered an expert in porto-colonial archeology, a field of study focusing on world culture evolving out of the Age of Exploration between the 1400s and 1600s.
However, the recognized expert on the local Native American nation is Clay Swindell, a board member of the First Colony Foundation, and the chief archaeologist for the Navy’s mid-Atlantic region. Swindell believes what has been found at the dig may be the missing piece of the puzzle linking, establishing the location for the Algonquin village.
“He has reviewed these artifacts and says ‘Yes, these are from the period of the English arrival and the village of Roanoac,’” Klingelhofer said.
Although the evidence does seem to point to the ring being an English trade good from the late 16th century, there is a definitive test that will prove its origin conclusively. The ring will be sent to Jamestown for testing.
“We’ve made arrangements with Jamestown for this to be sent there and to be analyzed because the Jamestown archaeologists have a lot of copper and even some wire, because copper was a currency for the first generation of colonization here,” Klingelhofer said.
The ring seems like a small item to create the excitement that it has. Even for Klingelhofer with years of field experience in Europe and North America, finding a copper ring among the sherds of pottery was an important moment that he recalls.
“I was extremely pleased,” he said. “I knew what it meant.”
