Scott Dawson feels passionately that the Lost Colony was never lost.
“The Lost Colony is a marketing campaign that started in 1937 and it created this myth of a colony that vanished, and none of that is real,” said Dawson, president of the Croatoan Archaeologist Society. He also runs the Lost Colony Museum on Hatteras Island, where the Croatoan Native tribe lived in the 16th century.
Dawson recently spoke at the Roanoke River Maritime Museum in Plymouth, North Carolina highlighting the recent discovery of artifacts supporting the idea that English colonists who supposedly disappeared from Roanoke Island actually chose to live alongside the Croatoan tribe.
“We have empirical, physical evidence coming out of the ground with the best professionals in the world behind it,” Dawson said.
Archaeologists found “buckets” of hammer scale, a leftover material from blacksmithing, Dawson said.
“This is showing a presence of the English working metal and living in the Indian Village for decades,” he said. “We're finding this whole metalworking workshop on the site and natives didn't do that.”
More than 100 colonists established camp in what is now Manteo in 1587. The leader of the expedition returned to England on a resupply mission and returned in 1590 to find the Roanoke settlement abandoned, with one word carved in a wooden post: Croatoan.
For centuries, theories abound on what happened to the colonists. Some believe they simply perished in the unfamiliar environment, or maybe an unknown disease ravaged the population. Others think indigenous tribes killed the colonists while others, like Dawson, have long believed they assimilated with and lived alongside the Croatoan tribe.
“They say that the colony vanished and they left behind this cryptic message on a tree, ‘Croatoan,’ and no one knows what it means,” Dawson said. “The reason they do this is mystery sells, right? But Croatoan is Hatteras Island. It's clearly labeled on the maps.”
As Hatteras Island becomes more developed, finding proof of history is critical, Dawson said.
“The archaeology is just a cherry on top, but the fact that we're able to preserve all of this Croatoan material as well, that makes me happy because it's in real danger of being lost,” he said.
