2016/01/01 by Christopher M. B. Allison · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Religious Tourism and Spaces
paper · pdf · doi:10.22332/con.ess.2016.2
openalex publication_date 2016/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
When the news broke in 2015 that archaeologists had uncovered a reliquary in Jamestown, some authors intimated that it would force us to reconsider the history of early America anew. Others suggested that the public and those involved in archaeological findings should know better, that the religious diversity among early settlers had long been established in the scholarship. Both perspectives have some validity, but the discovery demonstrates that our greatest insights and questions can come from the ground. The reliquary’s preeminent value—and why it deserves to be considered as remarkable—is as a material source that raises new questions and helps us imagine new possibilities around the earliest English settlement in North America.