Crafting lives, crafting society in seventeenth-century Jamestown, Virginia

In planting the first permanent New World English settlement at Jamestown in 1607, the Virginia Company hoped to replicate profits made through diversified investment in town-based industries in England and overseas. While colonial commerce took off with tobacco, commodity extraction and manufacturing efforts at Jamestown sputtered, despite vigorous recruitment and generous incentives for skilled emigrants.;The failure of Jamestown's economy to diversify as planned has been attributed to tobacco's success, and tobacco has been blamed for the failure of "real" towns---much less industry---to flourish in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. This dissertation contends that the propaganda-laden documentation of industrial-scale failures such as the Glasshouse and Falling Creek ironworks overshadow evidence for the viability of smaller-scale craft production in Jamestown. If acknowledged previously, such craft efforts have been sentimentalized as the root of a "great industrial nation," or dismissed as failed experiments, doomed by tobacco in post-Company Virginia.;This dissertation presents historical and archaeological evidence that artisans labored at Jamestown throughout the seventeenth century, both independently and sponsored by entrepreneurial elites. Evidence for higher relative upward mobility among artisans suggests that the interface between artisanship and the dominant agricultural economy was complex rather than simple. Replicating English labor and capital investment strategies, Jamestown's craft practitioners and sponsors pursued diversified paths to crafting new lives in Virginia. Land records, court documents and artifact distributions combine to produce case studies linking material evidence for crafting with known artisans and entrepreneurs at Jamestown. This activity is situated within the broader context of English Atlantic colonizing efforts.;The dissertation builds on a century of excavations at Jamestown by using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to re-provenience; the massive Jamestown archaeological collection curated by the National Park Service. For the first time, spatial analysis in the townsite includes plowzone deposits which---despite comprising over 75% of the collection---have been excluded from previous synthetic analyses.;My findings call for complication of what has been assumed concerning opportunities for free artisans in the early Chesapeake, and of everyday Jamestown life more generally.