Fort Eustis Cultural Resources Management

01/20/2026

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The Fort Eustis Cultural Resource Management Program manages over 200 archaeological sites at Fort Eustis. These sites range from Indigenous sites that are thousands of years old, to a variety of historic sites dating from the 1600s-1900s.

01/02/2026

THE MYSTERY AT JAMESTOWN by Carole Marsh is a kids’ book set at Jamestown and other parts of the Historic Triangle. It’s part of a series of mysteries for kids set at notable places.

Christina and Grant and their grandparents arrive at the Norfolk, VA airport on their way to vacation at Busch Gardens. At the airport they run into Joe, an archaeologist they met during a previous adventure. This changes their plans and they decide to visit Jamestown first. Christina and Grant meet a couple of other kids, Alex (Joe’s son) and Courtney. All is not well at Jamestown: bones are missing and Joe is suspected of stealing them!

The kids receive a series of mysterious notes that direct them to different places around Jamestown, where they don’t do much to solve the mystery but do learn something about history. Their grandparents take them to Williamsburg and Yorktown too, so more history is sprinkled in. Eventually the bad guy is caught, more through luck than through the characters’ actions, and also partly due to his (bad guy’s) own ineptitude.

Why do kids’ books always conflate Historic Jamestowne and Jamestown Settlement? They’re in different places and run by different organizations. Here the kids walk from one to the other, and though the book briefly acknowledges that the settlement is in a different location, it obscures that it’s over a mile, along a road with no sidewalk, and there is a separate entrance fee for the settlement. Also, kids want to read about other kids doing things without adult involvement, but in today’s world it’s not really realistic to think a group of kids no older than 10 can roam around like this without comment.

Also, the kids end up getting trapped at Jamestown Settlement after closing and think they’ll have to spend the night in a reconstructed native house, because they went into the woods to look at a clue and couldn’t find their way out before it got dark. The settlement closes at 5. This book takes place in the summer. There would be over three hours of daylight after closing time.

The grandparents take the kids to “a waterside restaurant overlooking Jamestown.” Billsburg Brewery? That’s the only establishment that’s remotely nearby, though it doesn’t really overlook Jamestown. Of course, in this world, the family “got to Jamestown and checked into their motel,” a motel that’s within walking distance from the excavations at Historic Jamestowne. There is nothing like this in reality.

This nitpicking is all a long way of wondering why authors don’t seem to do basic research. The actual history of English settlement, etc. is accurate, at least. It’s just these details of life around the main characters that are strangely off. The Colonial Parkway is “a pretty brick road” (it’s concrete). A costumed interpreter in Colonial Williamsburg is off on his rounds to “light the gaslights” (they’re electric, and would not have been gas at the time Colonial Williamsburg depicts in any case).

For adults, the mystery, plot, and characters are all a little thin. If you live in the area, the inaccuracies about local matters may annoy you. Kids may not have the same hangups, and there is some decent history in the book. If you were going to vacation in the area it might be something to read as an accompaniment to the trip.

10/01/2025

Early anthropologists assumed that prehistoric societies had started out as matriarchal (among other things) and progressed through time until reaching the pinnacle of human culture: Western society in the Victorian period. In the twentieth century the idea of prehistoric matriarchy gained a new popularity as a feminist utopia, an idea that drew inspiration from the work of Marija Gimbutas. From this soil sprang THE YEAR THE HORSES CAME by Mary Mackey.

Marrah lives between six and seven thousand years ago in what is now Brittany. On the day of her coming of age ceremony, she finds a mostly-drowned man on the beach. This stranger looks very different from the people of Marrah’s village, with his light hair and eyes. He has golden jewelry depicting some strange animal, like a deer but not. A second man like this turns up, this one dead. It turns out the two are brothers from far away (today’s Eastern Europe/western Asia) who left their nomadic horse-riding people to explore the west. Their people, and probably the dead brother, intended this to be for the purposes of seeing whether it was worth raiding and conquering, but the living brother, Stavan, a gentler soul to begin with, is rethinking that plan. Fortunately he turns out to speak the language of Shara, a city on the Black Sea and Marrah’s mother’s birthplace, so the characters and the reader don’t have to suffer long with communication problems.

Marrah’s mother had had a vision years ago that her daughter would save her people from “beastmen” from the east, and now she has another vision reinforcing that. Marrah and her younger brother Arang must travel to Shara and warn the people. They, along with Stavan, join some traders and set off on a journey that takes them to the Mediterranean (stopping to see some Paleolithic painted caves on the way), then to Sardinia, where Marrah enters a temporary marriage with Stavan (at the age of 14!), and on eastward until they reach Shara, which seems to be on the Black Sea coast somewhere in what is now Romania. Stavan leaves to go back to his people and convince them there’s no reason to explore westward.

Nothing happens immediately, and Marrah is welcomed by her Sharan grandmother. Eventually, two years later, she travels northward to another city, but upon arrival her party discovers it has just been sacked by the “beastmen.” Marrah and Arang are taken captive by the nomads. Fortunately for them, it’s the same group that Stavan comes from, although he’s now regarded as bewitched and insane. An enslaved interpreter manages to convince everyone that Arang is actually Stavan’s brother’s child, so Stavan’s father, the chief of the tribe, makes Arang his heir. Marrah is given to Stavan’s half-brother Vlahan as a second wife.

Life among the nomads isn’t fun for any of our protagonists. Eventually Stavan’s father dies. As is customary, horses, wives, and retainers will be sacrificed to join him in the afterlife. Vlahan decides Marrah should be among them. At the last minute she’s saved through luck, a little help from her friends, and a “magic” gift she received when visiting the painted cave. She, Arang, Stavan, and a few friends escape westward to have two books’ worth more of adventures.

Perhaps the trope of the Chosen One didn’t seem like such a cliché in the 1990s. Why do the Sharans even need some special person to warn them about the beastmen anyway? Wouldn’t they hear the news from outlying towns as the nomad incursions begin to affect their cultural sphere? Once Marrah arrives and warns everyone, they don’t even really take her seriously. Also, why did Marrah’s mother go so far west to raise her child, much farther than seems necessary to protect her from any threats in Shara – over a thousand miles. Maybe it was just so we could travel with Marrah through Neolithic Europe and see different places and people. The journey takes about two-thirds of the book.

Marrah’s culture and Stavan’s culture are both fairly unrealistic; one an idealized version of what the past was like, the other the opposite. Marrah’s people have equality between the sexes, a pretty egalitarian-seeming society in general (even though some places have queens), free love, they respect animals and use every part, etc. Stavan’s people are constantly violent and misogynistic, and life is cheap. There’s no nuance. No nomads who are tender to their wives in private, for instance – at least none that we see. The author acknowledges the work of Gimbutas as an inspiration for her depiction of Europe but doesn’t seem to have done much research on cultures of the steppes – an area known for female warrior burials.

It’s interesting to see that whenever mass human sacrifice appears in a novel, the protagonist always has to be caught up in it as a potential victim. IN THE COURT OF THE QUEEN has this plot point in Mesopotamia, JOURNEY TO THE SUN and CRICKET SINGS have it at Cahokia, and THE YEAR THE HORSES CAME has it on the steppes (probably based on Herodotus’s description of Scythian burial customs).

In the end, despite the book’s playing fast and loose with archaeology, it’s pretty entertaining to read. Marrah et al. are engaging characters. As long as you don’t think you’re really learning history from this, it’s a fun read.

09/18/2025

Enough was enough! The Section 106 and NEPA compliance took some time to get in order, but with that done everything was now good to go. The Holy Hand Gr***de of Antioch would finally put an end to the park’s problematic rabbit by blowing it to tiny bits. One… Two…. Five! ***de

09/03/2025

The alarm meant only one thing, an intern had probably bumped into the Ark of the Covenant again, dislodged the lid, and accidentally melted their face off. Maybe it was time to rope off the artifact or something. Or better yet, maybe every sacred relic doesn’t actually belong in a museum.

09/02/2025

ARTIFACTS by Mary Anna Evans is the first in a long series about archaeologist Faye Longchamp. When we meet her, she’s doing things she’s not proud of in order to be able to keep her home, an old plantation house on an island off Florida’s Gulf coast. To be able to afford the property taxes, she’s been supplementing her archaeological day job by digging up artifacts and selling them to collectors and private museums. She knows it’s against archaeological ethics, but she can’t lose the house. There’s also Joe to consider – a Creek man, sort of a drifter, who’s really into primitive technology and who lives on Faye’s island. He’s young and sort of an innocent, and Faye feels protective of him.

Then during one of her illicit digs, Faye finds recent bones. Soon afterward, two students from the archaeology crew she’s working with are murdered. Faye tries to figure out who the bones she found could be while also trying to save her home, avoid detection as a looter, discover her own history, and maybe have a little romance – but is the man she’s interested in really who she thinks he is? And meanwhile, a killer may be targeting her.

This is probably the only book to have Chekov’s atlatl. In the early pages, Joe presents Faye with a weapon he’s (mostly) made himself, incorporating a couple of parts from Faye’s artifact collection. The author seems unclear on what an atlatl really is, describing it as “an archaic type of spear that was thrown by slinging its hinged spearthrower in a whiplash motion.” Hinged? Anyway, this atlatl does indeed appear later on. (Obligatory link to atlatl information: www.worldatlatl.org)

There’s a lot going on in this book, and strangely that makes it seem to move slowly at times as it has to progress on so many fronts. Faye’s looting is troublesome, even if she has a sympathetic reason for it. At the end things wrap up for her personally a little too easily. Still, it’s an interesting book set in an area that’s not as often visited in archaeological fiction. The off-the-grid living situation is also fun to see. If you like this book, you’ll be happy to know there are several more in the series.

08/04/2025

Come work with us at Fort Eustis! We have a position open for an archaeologist.

The Archaeologist I will work closely with CEMML Archaeologist II and JBLE Cultural Resources Manager. The Archaeologist I will also assist with site monitoring and architectural surveys. Additionally, the technician may assist with the annual Tribal Consultation meeting, compile National Register o...

08/01/2025

GODS OF THUNDER by Timothy Pauketat is a sort of companion to his earlier excellent book CAHOKIA: ANCIENT AMERICA’S GREAT CITY ON THE MISSISSIPPI, but much wider-ranging geographically. The focus of the book starts in Mesoamerica, then slowly moves north and then east, through northern Mexico into the U.S. Southwest, across the Great Plains and into the Mississippian world exemplified by Cahokia. Pauketat proposes that religious beliefs and practices across a huge swath of North America concerning “Wind-That-Brings-Rain” gods and/or Thunderers can all be tied back to a Mesoamerican origin and that these beliefs and practices spread during the Medieval Warm Period along with maize agriculture.

For example, Pauketat connects the voladores poles of Mexico, from which dancers tied to ropes launch themselves and spin to the ground, with poles elsewhere ranging from the many poles of Cahokia to the Sun Dance poles of Plains peoples – and even closer to home for Ft. Eustis: “To the east, the image of a circular pole dance ceremony was painted by an early English artist…in the 1580s” (page 116) (https://encyclopediavirginia.org/1663-9dadb0c31c73827/; also see https://tinyurl.com/3x742eaj and https://tinyurl.com/yx65b2ya for a modern take). Assuming these all (especially the Mid-Atlantic version) stem from the same root seems like a stretch, at least without more evidence than he provides. Other concepts that get a lot of attention are square and round pyramids/mounds and round water temples or sweat baths. Maybe these things are in fact all connected, but we don’t see enough in this book to really convince. Maybe interested readers are expected to track down the sources in the bibliography, which is extensive.

The ideas presented here are intriguing, but the book tries to cover a lot of ground, geographically, without delving into any one location in too much depth. The result is that it sometimes seems like everything that seems even superficially similar is being grouped together as the same thing.

A strength of the book is that it takes a holistic view at a huge area of North America without regard for modern political boundaries (it’s easy to have a mental divide between the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, despite the cultural continuity throughout the region in the past) and without seeing different culture areas as walled-off entities between which no ideas would pass. As a bonus, each chapter ends with two or three sites connected to that chapter that you can visit, with a few paragraphs of advice on how best to travel there and what to see.

While it may not lay out as much support for its ideas as would be ideal, this book is still intriguing and worth reading.

This watercolor by English artist John White shows a festive dance scene in Secotan, an Indian town in the Outer Banks region of present-day North Carolina. White visited the town in July 1585, when a great religious ceremony, perhaps connected to the corn harvest, was taking place. Indians from oth...

07/01/2025

THE WINDEBY PUZZLE by Lois Lowry, about the life of a young person who became a bog body, is a book that elicits mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s good to see fiction set during the Iron Age, especially aimed at a younger (middle grade) audience. On the other, it’s somewhat unsatisfying in its approach to the story, which alternates with nonfiction sections in which the author explains why she wrote the story she did. The fiction sections seem a little simplistic at times (though this may be because of the target age), and there are places in the book where it seems like the author didn’t do very in-depth research and is importing her own attitudes into the past.

The bog body known as Windeby I was found in Germany in 1952. At first it was thought to be a girl; later studies revealed it to be a teenage boy. Lowry explains how she was gripped by the question of who this person was and how/why they died. At first, thinking the body was a girl, she wrote the story of Estrild, a girl who dreamed of being a warrior. With the help of her friend Varick, a disabled boy who works for the village blacksmith, she secretly practices handling a shield and sword, chanting the warriors’ chant, and twisting her hair into the Swabian knot the warriors use. But when she presents herself among other potential warriors at the spring festival, the authorities sentence her to be drowned in the bog for her presumption.

After an interlude explaining the updated understanding of the bog body, the story starts over starring Varick. It’s not the exact same story, though; Estrild is not preparing to be a warrior and doesn’t appear much in this version. Varick is interested in the natural world, in how animal skeletons fit together, and in why lights sometimes appear over the bog. But then he gets sick and feverishly walks into the bog.

Both fiction sections are only about 50-75 pages long, with Estrild’s slightly longer than Varick’s. That doesn’t give a whole lot of space to give us a look at how the world is. Lowry seems (from her remarks in the nonfiction parts) to rely a lot on what Tacitus said about the German tribes in depicting her Iron Age setting. Are the writings of someone from a hostile nation who had an interest in portraying all non-Romans as barbaric really the best foundation for worldbuilding? Perhaps not. She also seems to see the women of the village as very oppressed, working nonstop, churning out babies, etc., but is this really how they would have experienced their lives, or is it how a 21st-century person imagines they would have felt? There are some other minor annoyances too, like how people keep saying “dowry” but describing bride price, how they supposedly mostly wear “no-color” clothes because dyeing is too much of a pain to bother with (this is not supported by the archaeological record FROM BOG BODIES’ CLOTHES), and how they don’t seem to know many people in a village that probably only has a few hundred inhabitants. It’s possible to mostly ignore these, though readers may be unconsciously forming their ideas about the past on inaccuracies.

If paired with some nonfiction material, this book could be a way to introduce kids to this time period in northern Europe and would be a good starting point for discussions on topics like how the past is portrayed or women’s roles in different societies. On the writing side, it gives some insight into how one author approaches storytelling.

06/27/2025

The Joneses weren't the only family to ever live in the Matthew Jones House. In the late nineteenth century the house was occupied by the Webbs, who are the ones who converted the house from 1 1/2 stories to a full two stories. Here is a picture of the Reverend William Webb, his second wife Mary Elizabeth, and three of the 10 Webb children, Hearner, Sara, and Estelle (front). Estelle was born in 1901, so this picture must have been taken sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century.

You may wonder how a family of 12 could fit into the Jones house. The children's birth dates span 31 years, so the older ones must have been living elsewhere by the time the younger ones came along. Still, at the time of Estelle's birth, seven of the children would have been under 18.

You can look at their family tree starting here: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Webb-3512

06/17/2025

Checking on some sites along the river.