Archaeologist Bill Kelso, director of the Jamestown Rediscovery excavation project, surveys a discovery.

Archaeologist Bill Kelso, director of the Jamestown Rediscovery excavation project, surveys the remains of a long, row-house-like structure emerged from underneath a Civil War earthwork this past year. The discovery helped give a new direction to the 10-year-old investigation of the historic fort erected by English colonists in 1607. (Joe Fudge/Daily Press photo)

Kelso was the excavation's sole employee, in fact, when he began working at Jamestown in 1993. He set up shop in an unheated, dilapidated building near the old church, churning out grant proposals under a peeling ceiling on a picnic table converted into an office desk.

Nearly a year passed before he and the APVA found the money to hire both Straube and Luccketti.

Not until April of 1994 did the newly dubbed project, known as Jamestown Rediscovery, put its first shovel into the ground.

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"We immediately found these early, early artifacts - earlier than anything that had ever been found - and they all pointed to the Elizabethan era," Kelso recalls. "We found the beginnings of a palisade - and everything started to look pretty good.

"In some ways, it was too easy. So we had to be skeptical. We knew we could have been wrong. My biggest fear was that we had found some kind of later extension and were trying to turn it into the fort."

Kelso's fears became palpable when the line of soil stains that marked the palisade suddenly came to a stop.

Only later, after the archaeologists pushed ahead, did they discover how the split-timber wall had changed shape, moving from a straight line into half-round, military bulwark surrounded by a shallow moat.

Straube had her moments of nagging doubt, too, especially after the field crew began turning up pound after pound of window glass in a place that wasn't supposed to have windows.

"Once we realized that it was cullet - that it was being used to make new glass - then it made perfect sense," she explained at the time.

"It even gave us a way to date what we were finding."

That early 1608 date - which was based on the settlers' references to an experimental glasshouse, helped cement the archaeologists' original hunches. So did the discovery of a second palisade wall, this one so consistent in its course that the telltale soil stains began to show up in every new test hole that the excavators plotted.

By September 1996, so much evidence had piled up that the identity of the fort seemed conclusive. Kelso and the APVA announced their landmark find at a news conference that attracted international attention.

"We walked over to a newsstand on the way to breakfast that morning and saw the front page picture - then the headline - and then, a little later in the day, the news reports on CNN and the Today show," Kolstelny recalls.

"It was a goose-bumpy moment - a fantastic moment - when Bill finally made the announcement. We'd never been on the map in this way before."

Since that time, much of the excavation has focused on locating the elusive third wall of the fort, which Kelso believed he had to find in order to be absolutely certain.

With each new shovel of dirt unearthed by the search, more and more artifacts have appeared, eventually reaching the kind of numbers that Kelso had both hoped for and feared.

Straube and her staff have cataloged about 500,000 objects so far. But with 250,000 items still waiting in plastic bags - and more being added everyday-their task seems both endless and monumental.

Little time remains to study and interpret anything but the most promising finds, which conjure up such a vivid and detailed portrait of the early 17th-century settlement's life that the collection has become a globally important historical resource.

Tools, weapons, clothing accessories, trade items, personal belongings - even religious objects and toys can be found on Straube's shelves, each of them capable of telling illuminating stories. Stored alongside them are the vegetable and animal remains from which one archaeologist has already reconstructed a provocative picture of the colonists' diets.

"I like them all. I care for them all - because they all have something to say," Straube explains, unable to decide on her favorites.

"But what I really like best is that it's never just singular. It's the information that they give us as a whole that really makes this collection special."

More discoveries wait in the soil, which Civil War laborers piled up as much as 10 feet high when they built their fort over the remains of Jamestown. And it's the lure of uncovering that long-lost landscape and the secrets it holds that keeps Kelso and his colleagues coming back for more.

"Everytime we find something new, there's that same sense of excitement - that same feeling of euphoria that we had at the beginning," he says.

"Now we're finding buildings. We're going to find the church. And eventually we'll have the entire fort back to its original 17th-century grade. So you'll be able to stand here and imagine what it was like even if we don't reconstruct it."