Just one week after it was named to the National Trust’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list in 2022, Jamestown experienced one of its worst flooding episodes in recent history.

“We had a Nor’easter off the coast that didn’t even drop any rain on us, but it raised the water levels in the James River to the point that we had two feet of water over average levels,” said Sean Romo, director of archaeology at Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation. “It was the most flooding we’ve had here in a very long time.”

Historic Jamestowne is the original site of North America’s first permanent English settlement located in present-day Jamestown, Virginia. The first English colonists arrived in 1607, but the site’s significance started thousands of years earlier with the Native Americans who first occupied the land, the Paspahegh people, part of the tribes led by Wahunsenacawh, or Chief Powhatan. Today, it’s an archaeological hotbed, with millions of artifacts already found and many more still buried deep. The work to uncover them has been increasingly threatened by climate change and severe weather events in recent decades.

"Climate change is affecting all kinds of sites, including some extremely nationally significant sites like Jamestown,” said National Trust Senior Policy Director Jim Lindberg. “Climate change doesn’t pick and choose.”

Organizations like Preservation Virginia and Jamestown Rediscovery are acting fast—and approaching the issue from multiple strategic angles—in order to rescue these cultural resources while they still can.

“The threat is significant enough that measures to overcome it, to address it, need to include a full spectrum of possibilities,” said Lindberg.

Rediscovering Jamestown

Preservation Virginia—a nonprofit that operates Historic Jamestowne through a public/private partnership with the National Park Service—established the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project in 1994. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the prevailing theory was that the 1607 fort was fully submerged under the James River, which flows adjacent to the site. But starting in the 1960s, William Kelso, a professor from the College of William & Mary, began to question this story. He had evidence to support a new idea, that the remains of James Fort were still above the water line.

After convincing Preservation Virginia of his theory, the organization supported Kelso in launching the Jamestown Rediscovery project, and his team began excavations in April 1994. They soon had gathered enough archaeological evidence to definitively prove that the dry land surrounding a surviving 17th century church tower was, in fact, the original site of James Fort.

Michael Lavin, director of collections for Jamestown Rediscovery, has been with the team for nearly 30 years, so he’s witnessed firsthand how the increasingly severe climate is impacting the historic site and the cultural resources it contains.

“I can actually see the landscape changing over time. Areas that were dry are wet, areas that we could access for investigations, for archaeology, we cannot anymore,” Lavin said. “The intensity [of weather events] is stronger and the frequency is more often. So just in my career here at Jamestown, I am an eyewitness to these changes.”

Finding Funding

Those passionate about preserving Jamestown aren’t standing idle as these threats persist. The Save Jamestown Campaign, which was launched in conjunction with the National Trust’s 11 Most listing in 2022, has raised $8.5 million to date through individual donations, corporate gifts, state appropriations, and federal grants. In the 2024 Virginia State budget cycle, the campaign secured $1.5 million in state funding and is slated to receive additional funds from the 2025 budget.

The money is being leveraged to improve the site’s infrastructure and ability to withstand more extreme weather events, while also implementing what’s known as salvage archaeology, an approach that emphasizes recording and preserving artifacts and cultural resources expeditiously, before it’s too late.

Fortifying the Fort

One key piece of infrastructure that the site strengthened is its historic seawall, originally installed between 1901 and 1906 to arrest erosion occurring on the side of the island that abuts the James River. Constructed of interlocking concrete blocks, the seawall protected the land for decades. But it began to suffer more frequent breaches starting in the early 1980s, requiring costly repairs every five to eight years.

Recognizing that this approach was no longer sustainable, Jamestown Rediscovery contracted with engineers from Vanasse Hangen Brustlin and construction firm Coastal Design & Construction to complete a seawall augmentation in 2022 that is estimated to last for the better part of the next century. The team placed 96,000 tons of armor stone on the existing seawall to mitigate erosion and wave action from the James River. With that threat neutralized, Jamestown Rediscovery is able to focus its efforts on the landward side of the property, where archaeological resources remain under threat.

Finishing the seawall project “completely changed the focus of the archeology research program to start looking at the causes of this, and then start understanding the effects that extreme weather and sea level rise have had specifically on this property,” said Lavin.

Mitigating Root Causes

While aboveground flooding is the more visible threat, changes happening underground are just as insidious. More frequent storms and rising tides have led to increased groundwater levels beneath the surface on Jamestown Island, infiltrating archaeological features that were previously in dry zones.

“There’s a space that we’ve had open for about two years that we’re getting ready to close up,” said Romo. “There’s groundwater in it almost year-round. We get maybe a month when it’s dry. We can’t responsibly keep that open anymore because the water is damaging the resource.”

“It is going to be a heavy lift to recover as much data as we can and to mitigate some of these areas,” Romo added, “but we’re doing as much as we can to assess them, to triage them.”

The team is currently readying to begin an excavation across one of the lowest lying places at the historic site. Known as Smithfield, the area includes a burial ground that starts on high ground but then dips lower. Where the burial ground ends is currently unknown. Archaeologists aim to uncover as many remains as they can before water renders them vanished.