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This silver seal bears an intricate scene reminding its owner of the short time he had on Earth. A skeleton holds both an hourglass and an arrow, representing the passage of time and the

shortness of life. The owner's initials, "LF," are above the hourglass. After pushing it into hot wax, the seal would then have been pressed onto documents in order to seal them. This image of the seal has been digitally reversed, as the initials would need to be backwards so that they would appear correctly on the document. The seal was found inside James Fort, near the northern bulwark. This area was rich in artifacts and was the location of the artifact-laden early-17th century well.

Silver Skeleton Seal1

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"Yames Towne" Lead Tag This small lead plaque, reading "Yames

Towne," is the equivalent of a modern-day luggage tag. The plaque was probably marking

some merchandise that had been warehoused in London before being shipped out to Jamestown. The odd "Y" spelling may suggest a German or Dutch origin for the goods as those languages represented "j"s with "y"s during this time period. This tag was one of the remarkable finds discovered in an early-17th century well just inside the northern bulwark of James Fort in the Summer of 2006. Other artifacts found inside the well include a Scottish pistol, a halberd bearing the crest of Lord De La Warr, several Bartmann jugs, a child's shoe, and even a 400-year-old tobacco seed.

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Memento Mori RingThe early 17th-century gold ring

depicts a skull with the initials C L and the Latin legend: Memento Mori or "remember thy death." Bly Straube, Historic Jamestown's Senior Curator, speculates that the initials could be attributed to Captain Christopher

Lawne who was a member of the first Virginia General Assembly. Straube indicates "The ring would have been very expensive and would have been worn by a person of significant wealth and stature."

Captain Lawne arrived at Jamestown on April 27, 1619, with fifteen settlers and established one of the first English settlements in Isle of Wight County on a creek that still bears his name. Captain Lawne and Ensign Washer represented Lawne's Plantation in the first House of Burgesses that met at Jamestown on the 30th day of July 1619. Lawne died in November of the same year.

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Silver Ear Picker A status symbol and hygienic tool, this ear

picker was found at the James Fort site by APVA Preservation Virginia archaeologists and undoubtedly belonged to one of Jamestown's early gentlemen. The ear picker is in the form of a sea creature -- probably a dolphin -- which was a popular image during the adventurous sea

explorations in the Age of Discovery.Made of silver, this tool was a costly status symbol, and the owner

would have proudly displayed it to represent his status, probably suspended from a chain attached to a belt around his waist.

Ear pickers, though not all of silver, were used by all levels of society in medieval and post-medieval England. As was the fashion for many of these tools, this one is double-ended. The pointed end was used to clean teeth and nails, and the spoon-shaped end was used to remove earwax. The 17th-century English knew about plaque, which they called "scale" or "surf," and they were encouraged by their doctors to scrape their teeth frequently. They also knew that a buildup of earwax could cause deafness. As gross as that may seem to us today, the earwax was often saved and used for coating sewing thread to make it stronger and easier to use.

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Robert Cotton Pipe The inclusion of a tobacco pipemaker in the first groups of craftsmen is as enigmatic to researchers today as it apparently was to John Smith when Robert Cotton, "tobacco-pipe-maker," arrived on the Phoenix in January 1608.1 No other mention is made of Cotton, so it is not known how long he remained at Jamestown; he is not listed in the muster of 1624-25, so presumably Cotton had either perished or returned to England by then. With

archival information lacking, the material evidence of very accomplished mold-made clay tobacco pipes, fabricated from the Virginia red clay and decorated on the stem with European stamps, provides the sole documentation for this early craftsman's work. These distinctive pipes only occur in the early James Fort features that date around 1610 and have not yet been recorded on any other early Virginia sites.

The design of the stamp on the pipe stems consists of four fleur-de-lis forming a cross within a diamond. The sides of the diamond are incurving as on the 1580-1610 pipes documented in England and thought to be the product of London pipemaker, William Batchelor.2 Robert Cotton must also have been a London pipemaker because pipemaking was almost entirely restricted to that city by monopoly, until the second decade of the 17th century.3 Other aspects of Cotton's stamp reflect decorative motifs of late 16th-and early 17th-century London pipes, which most often include incuse "diamond patterns enclosing initials, crosses or fleur-de-lis on the stems."4

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Brass Nuremberg Thimble Some tools traditionally used by tailors have been

excavated from early contexts within James Fort and may relate to the presence of the first seven tailors. These include thimbles, needles, straight pins, pressing irons, and bodkins. . . . This brass Nuremberg thimble was found in the bulwark trench of James Fort. There is a maker's mark in the symbol of a bell just above the decorative band of foliage. Fourteen thimbles have been recovered from the excavations within James Fort. The word thimble means thumb or thick finger2. This reflects its purpose as a protection for the finger in pushing a needle

through fabric or leather.Eleven of the James Fort thimbles are made of brass and six of them were recovered

from the same pre-1610 location and manufactured in Nuremberg, Germany. By the middle of the 16th century, Nuremberg prevailed in the production of small brass objects, particularly thimbles. This dominance is due to the discovery of a high-quality brass, produced by alloying copper and zinc, "which created a smooth bright brass of an even texture."3 Also, the craftsmen developed a technique to make two-part thimbles. This simplified the process of decorating the thimbles, as it could be done while they were in flat sheets. The sides were then rolled onto cylinders and soldered together, the cap similarly attached on the top edge. The prior technique had involved heating the brass and punching it into molds. Any decoration then had to be applied by hand to the molded thimble.

Nuremberg thimbles typically are tall and narrow with a flat or only slightly rounded top. They are punched by hand around the sides in a spiral that continues over the top. Often, these thimbles bear decorative stamping around the border and/or maker's marks in the way of initials or symbols. This brass Nuremberg thimble was found in the bulwark trench of James Fort.

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