Roanoke Colony

The forward move on to the American continent was the work not of princes or capitalists at home in Europe, but of gold-hungry frontiersmen spurred on by the rapid exhaustion of the islands’ deposits. Without the short-lived gold rush on the Caribbean islands and the nearby Tierra Firme, the impetus towards the territorial conquest of the mainland

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Gough’s Cave provides us with some of the earliest evidence we have for human recolonisation of Britain after the peak of the Ice Age – these hunters were among the first people to return to these lands after the ice sheets shrank and melted. And they seem to have mainly used this cave as a camp while hunting wild horses. But the human presence at

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The first English settlement in North America, Roanoke Island in 1585, probably did not die out but was absorbed into the nearby Croatoan Indians, “thereby achieving a harmonious biracial society that always eluded colonial planters,” in the words of historian J. F. Fausz. Eventually the English and Croatoans may have become part of the Lumbees. Th

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of imagination. It has succeeded beyond expectation in extracting and describing sequences from material processes: how walls collapse; how ditches fill with silt, how organic materials can be dated and used to describe environmental change, diet, disease and injury. But it cannot get to grips with empty space and time: the unknown months, weeks, y

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