In the end, that’s all that’s left. The tombstone presents a final image of the deceased to those who visit it. In the 17th century, British settlers on the east coast of what would later become the United States already thought this way. Archaeologists found a black tombstone engraved with a knight in Jamestown, Virginia. For an entire decade, Professor Markus Key tried to understand who it belonged to and where it came from. In the International Journal of Historical Archeology, on September 4, he explained that he had succeeded.
With his colleague Rebecca Rossi, Markus Key first discovered that this tombstone was the oldest in the region and therefore in the country, since it was in Jamestown that the first colony was established, in 1607. Indigenous peoples certainly used items to cover tombs before this, but archaeologists believe they did so with wood or other materials, lost over time.
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Discovery of the identity of the Knight of Jamestown to whom the tombstone belonged
The tombstone that interested the two archaeologists is dated 1627. Made with black limestone, it is broken in several places – obviously for a very long time – and the researchers believe that it was once decorated with brass inlays, which were destroyed. Despite drawings indicating that it was the tomb of a knight, no name or lettered inscription gave any indication of the identity of the deceased.
Only two knights died at Jamestown between 1617 and 1637. The first was the colony’s first governor. He died in 1618 while crossing the Atlantic. The second was Sir George Yeardley. In 1680, his grandson by marriage wrote a letter asking to have the same inscriptions on his tomb as that of the “broken grave”. It would therefore appear that the mysterious knight who died in 1627 was Sir George Yeardley. The man, born in Southwark, England, in 1588, had emigrated to Virginia in 1610. In 1618, he was made governor by King James I. No samples are possible to prove that this is indeed his grave since the bones have been exhumed for a long time and have not been preserved in good conditions to find DNA.
Stones transported from Europe
It remained to be determined where Sir George Yeardley had found the stone which would be used to cover his grave. Markus Key and Rebecca Rossi analyzed the fossil sediments of this stone. “Because of evolutionary processes, biological species are far more unique across time and space than chemical elements or isotopic ratios”notes Markus Key to Phys.org.
The results revealed that the stone came from either Ireland or Belgium. Historical commercial relations for the stone trade tend to tip the scales for the flat country. Everything suggests, therefore, that the rich British colonists settled in America had their tombstones engraved in the European fashion before their death to have them transported by boat.
