Dumbfound Discovery in D.C.

Over the summer, my family and I went to Washington D.C.. We went to countless amounts of museums and saw extraordinary things like the Wright Brothers first plane and the gun that killed President Lincoln.

While I was in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, I was going through an exhibit that featured many things from the earliest settlements of the new world called "Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake". When I first entered the exhibit, I looked over to my right and was blown away by the scene of the mold of a skull that appeared to be carved or dug into with a sharp object.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/05/01/scientists-find-evidence-cannibalism-at-jamestown/

I walked over to the display. Next to the skull in the glass was a wax mold of a young ladies head and shoulders. She looked young and was in a position where you could see everything about her.

http://www.dailypress.com/features/history/dp-jamestown-cannibalism-20130522,0,6258299.post

I looked over to the poster that was next to the display. It said in large letters "Jane of Jamestown." I thought to myself; Jamestown, I remember vaguely learning about that in fifth grade. Underneath the title described what was in the display and what scientists had discovered happened to her and many others during "the starving times" of Jamestown.

http://chickgeek.org/jamestown-cannibals/

Many of the settlers from Jamestown were starving to death and had become very desperate so they resulted to the last possible solution that they could think of; cannibalism. They would dig up dead bodies that they had buried and they would eat them.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130501-jamestown-cannibalism-archeology-science/

In history class this year we learned about early Jamestown and we were asked a very complex question. That question was "Why did so many colonists die during early Jamestown?"


This connects to that question and what we learned about in class because this proves that one of the answers to that question was because of starvation. The starvation was so bad during this time that the settlers had to refer to eating their deceased.


I think that the discovery of cannibalism at Jamestown was a very significant discovery and will open up many doors in both the historic world and the scientific world. It will open up many doors because people will maybe think of cannibalism as a possible answer to some of their questions for other problems. Also, because many scientists can use this type of technology to help figure out many more historic mysteries.