The hidden history of Bermuda is reshaping the way we think about Colonial America

Smithsonian Magazine

For the past 14 years, Jarvis, a historian and archaeologist at the University of Rochester in New York, has led excavations in Bermuda seeking to uncover the secrets of its neglected colonial history. Nobody has done more to shed light on the islands’ important role in fostering the growth of Britain’s overseas realm and its American spinoff. Now he is confident he has located its first substantial settlement. His findings are exciting those who research Europe’s colonization of the New World, given how rare it is to uncover remnants of such an early English community in the Americas. Mark Horton, a British archaeologist digging for remnants of the failed 1587 Roanoke colony on the North Carolina coast, hails it as “a truly significant discovery” that will “greatly help in understanding early 17th-century settlement—not only in Bermuda, but at Jamestown, in New England and across the Caribbean.”

Last summer’s excavation at Smith’s Island. The work was funded by an archaeology fieldwork grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

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