Angela

In late August 1619, the planter and merchant John Rolfe recorded that roughly twenty Africans had been forced ashore at Point Comfort, near the mouth of the James River. They had been taken from Angola by Portuguese slave traders and then seized by English privateers in the Gulf of Mexico, making them the first Africans in mainland English America. This volume from the Jamestown Rediscovery team follows one of them, a woman named Angela, using archaeology, historical records, and archival research.

Angela appears in 1625 in the household of Captain William Pierce at Jamestown. Like the others who reached the colony, she had been caught up in violent wars in West Central Africa. She was one of hundreds of Angolans placed aboard a slave ship bound for Veracruz, Mexico. English privateers attacked the vessel, then carried the captives to Virginia and later to Bermuda, where they were sold as forced laborers to prosperous tobacco growers. Once in English America, these Angolans survived, kept going, and adapted to an unfamiliar world, and in doing so altered the direction of American history.

The book aims to restore a story that has long gone unrecorded, one that forms part of the shared early history of Jamestown, where Virginia Indians, Europeans, and Africans met on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

The project was carried out with the National Park Service and centered on excavating the site where Angela lived and worked. Because archaeology uncovers the material remains of everyday life, it is often the only way to reach the stories of people who were marginalized or left out of the historical record. A federal Civil Rights Initiative grant funded the work, and the team located the spaces that shaped Angela's daily surroundings in time for the 400th anniversary of the First Africans' forced arrival in Virginia.

The volume presents the findings: the remains of Angela's home, the techniques that revealed buried landscapes, and archival research into the lives of the First Africans in both Angola and Virginia. Written by David M. Givens, Director of Archaeology at Jamestown Rediscovery, it blends history, science, and archaeology and traces Angela's experiences through the physical evidence she left behind at Jamestown.