A few months ago, zooarchaeologist Stephen Atkins was puzzled.
He’d been hired as a consultant by the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation to help identify thousands of unknown animal remains recovered from a 17th-century well on the James Fort.
He could recognize many of them quickly after years in the field.
“I got some more pig, I got some more chicken,” Atkins said, describing sifting through the bones. “And all of a sudden this pops up.”
“This” was a pair of small jaw bones complete with lines of teeth. They didn’t match anything in the Jamestown collection, so Atkins got to investigating, and “was jumping up and down when I finally figured out what that was.”
Atkins’ team discovered the bones belonged to a small iguana – perhaps the earliest identified in North America.
“We’re still not sure,” said Leah Strickler, senior curator for Jamestown Rediscovery, which is affiliated with the nonprofit Preservation Virginia. “We're hoping by putting the word out there that maybe we'll hear from some folks who say, ‘Actually, no, ours is earlier.’”
The finding is 15 years in the making. The iguana bones were among half a million artifacts recovered when archaeologists excavated what’s called the First Well in 2009.
Located on the original James Fort, the well was used by settlers starting in 1608 under the leadership of Captain John Smith.
“We digged a faire Well of fresh water in the Fort of excellent, sweet water which till then was wanting,” Smith wrote at the time.
However, it quickly became a sort of trash can after being contaminated by brackish groundwater.
Colonists filled in the well just a couple years later after a particularly brutal winter known as the “starving time,” when the population declined from several hundred to 60 survivors. Archaeologists believe the town filled in various features of the fort afterward to start anew – and possibly to hide evidence that they’d resorted to cannibalism.
About 300,000 of the artifacts collected in 2009 were animal bones. Some were identified quickly, but others like the iguana remains have been sitting inside the Rediscovery Foundation’s collections vault, awaiting a grant to fund further work.
They got that chance in March, with a $100,000 grant from the nonprofit Conservation Fund. That’s when Atkins came on board, along with research partner Susan Andrews.
Andrews has found two additional bones associated with the iguana, from the back part of its skull.
The Florida Museum of Natural History also lent the team some iguana specimens to use for comparison.
Strickler said they went digging into written archives for any references colonists made about the reptiles – and found one from George Percy, one of the original settlers who traveled to Virginia aboard the Susan Constant.
“We also killed Guanas in fashion of a Serpent, and speckled like a Toade under the belly,” Percy wrote in a 1607 account from the Caribbean island of Mona.
If the colonists ended up eating the creatures, it was likely thanks to Indigenous knowledge, Strickler noted.
Atkins said understanding more about the context of the iguana at Jamestown could shed light on how colonists survived the starving period.
“We want to know, why was there an iguana here? It could have become food. Or was it somebody had an iguana skeleton? Did they have it maybe as a pet? That is the most important thing.”
