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Danielle Illes

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The Conspiracy Files: The Lost Colony of Roanoke (Video)

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The Conspiracy Files: The Lost Colony of Roanoke (Video)

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Description:
This video discusses the disappearance of the Roanoke colony, followed by the personal theories of the two narrators of the video.

Analysis
While the video does present accurate and actual information regarding the disappearance of the colony, a few different red flags are raised in this video. When presenting their own theories, the narrators need to be more conscious of confirmation bias as a lot of the information they included in their introduction seemed to conveniently line up with their theories. as well, I think the images they chose to use and the specific facts through their video display the use of appeal to authority. There theories seem a little forced. As a viewer, I think we need to be mindful of these kinds of videos that try to steer your thinking in one direction without providing opportunities to be critical.

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The Lost Roanoke Colony | The Conspiracy Files

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Hidden Patch on John White's Map (video)

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Hidden Patch on John White's Map (video)

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Description:
This video discusses the map that John White water painted during his initial visit to America. When the map is viewed under a special light there is a star shaped symbol that is believed to have been hidden within the map to protect the location of where the settlers went.

analysis:
This video relates back to the theory that the colony did move 50 miles inland. However, this video is stating that John White knew about the relocation. I think that this could display the red flag suppression by authority. I think that it John White knew where the colony had moved to settle, perhaps he was not sharing that information to either protect the colony.  While he also theorized that they moved to the island of Croatoan, he never actually attempted to travel there to see if he could find them due to bad weather.  It seems as those John almost did not want to find the colony for one reason or another and was making up excuses to not continue his search for them.

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New Clues to the fate of the Lost Colony/UNC-TV Science

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What Happened to the Lost Colony? (video)

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What Happened to the Lost Colony? (video)

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Description:
This video proposes a few different theories as to what could have happened to the lost colony. A theory that stood out to me is that they decided to move inland approximately 50 miles to a place called "site X." From there, it is believed that they were either slaughtered by existing tribes or were wiped out from disease or famine.

analysis:
While I think this video is informative and stays away from fictitious information and lacks flaws, I think it is also teetering in the area of the red flag proof by verbosity. There is a lot of different theories presented that I think can overwhelm the viewer into thinking that most if it has to true. there are so many possible explanations as to how they may have ended up at Site X that it becomes easy to agree with the logic presented in the video without really trying to take a critical stance.  There was also a lot of fluff around the theories presented so while the video does throw a lot of information at you, there is only brief information that backs up the different theories presented.

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What Happened to the Lost Colony at Roanoke? | National Geographic

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Description:
This article discusses the legitimacy of the Dare Stones. The first stone turned up in 1937 at Brenau university. After paying the man $1000 for the first stone other rocks began to turn up all over the place with similar inscriptions.

Analysis:
The first flaw that can be pointed out from this article is that the prescription was presumed to be that of Eleanor Dare given the initials. The researchers believed that if this was the grave of the first white child in America then it would surely put their college on the map. I think that the researchers developed an emotional connection to the rocks which lead to obscured rationale and thought. It's highly likely that many of the rocks that came after the first dare stone were fakes and nothing more than a cash grab for the people that found them. Confirmation bias could also play into their research because they were desperate to get their school on the map and any evidence that supported their theory was good evidence.

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With focus on the 400th anniversary of America's first permanent English settlement, interest revived in Brenau's unique trove of hand-carved rocks that could hold key clues to solving one of the Americas' greatest mysteries - what happened to 'The Lost Colony' of Roanoke. For many, however, the Eleanor Dare Stones remain merely a map to one of the better-played historical hoaxes of all time. Even in infamy, the 2,000 pounds of rocks that have been in Brenau's possession for seven decades hold an even better story of the nation's curiosity about her past.
What's the difference between kidney stones and "The Dare Stones?" Depending on whose they are, kidney stones could have more historical value.

Brenau's history Professor Jim Southerland, chuckles, but says it's not a totally fair statement. Over the past three decades Southerland by default became the university's scholarly voice on the significance of the unique trove of quartz, soapstone and other indigenous southeastern rocks. If nothing else, the stones are relics of one of the biggest hoaxes ever that, in the seven decades since their discovery, have attached a certain historical significance of their own. If they're what they purport to be, however, they would literally cause the chronicles of the American colonies to be rewritten. With authentication of the stones, Southerland elaborates, "The Lost Colony wouldn't be lost anymore because we would know what happened to it."

"The Lost Colony," of course, refers to the 117 men, women and children that Sir Walter Raleigh recruited in the late 1580s to establish a permanent settlement in the area now known as Virginia and North Carolina, the territory granted to him by the British queen, Elizabeth I. The complement included John White, whom Raleigh had appointed governor, White's pregnant daughter, Eleanor, and his son-in-law, Ananias Dare. A Raleigh-appointed sea captain, eager to get on with his primary business of piracy, put the colonists ashore, not on the Chesapeake Bay Coast that Raleigh had specified, but on the 18-square-mile Roanoke Island between North Carolina's Outer Banks barrier islands and the mainland. The next month Eleanor Dare gave birth to a daughter, Virginia, who was the first "English" child born in the New World. Because there was no time for planting crops, Gov. White returned to England for supplies, got his ship commandeered by the British government's preparations for the imminent Spanish Armada invasion of England, and did not get back to the Americas for almost four years. He found no trace of those he'd left behind - setting off a conundrum that baffled historians, inspired legends, created a multi-million-dollar tourist industry, and - for a time - made, then sullied, the reputation of a tiny, private women's college in Gainesville, Ga., 560 miles away.

Exaltation and Depression

In November 1937 as America clawed its way out of The Great Depression, a Californian man showed up at the history department of Emory University in Atlanta with a most peculiar object - a 21-pound chunk of rough veined quartz with some foreign looking words chiseled into its surface. The man said he found the rock in a North Carolina swamp, about 80 miles from Roanoke Island, while he was driving through on vacation. The strange stone caught the attention of one of the professors, Dr. Haywood Pearce Jr., who also served as vice president of Brenau, where his father was president. The inscription on the stone read "Ananias Dare & Virginia went hence unto heaven 1591," and a message to notify John White of that news bore the initials of the author of the carved writing, EWD, presumably those of Eleanor Dare.

Although Emory's historians weren't interested, Pearce and his father certainly were. Perhaps they concluded that, if this chuck of rock indeed marked the graves of America's "first white child" and her father, it might well be the thing to put their college on the map. They wound up paying the California man $1,000 for the treasure.

Anyone who has used tiller, plow or trowel in Appalachian dirt will swear the region grows rocks. But nothing plows better than cold cash. To make a long story short, over the next four years, similar rocks popped up all over the place, mostly found by four people. Pearce and his father over the years acquired close to 50 of the huge stones, all with similar inscriptions unearthed as far south as the banks of the Chattahoochee River near Atlanta. Although the Pearces' fervent explorations and money never turned up graves or any other evidence to authenticate the stones, a team of Smithsonian Institution-commissioned historians - headed by the venerable Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard - traveled to Gainesville and, in a preliminary report, assigned some validity to what had then come to be known as "The Dare Stones."

The Post Mortem

Everything was good. Pearce Jr. published articles and made speeches. Scores of newspaper and magazine articles trumpeted the Brenau artifacts. There was even talk that Hollywood mogul Cecil B. DeMille was interested in making a movie. Another Brenau professor penned a play about "The Lost Colony" that featured the Dare stones, Pearce Jr. as Sir Walter Raleigh and, as the baby Virginia Dare, Gainesville City Schools' current Special Assistant to the Superintendent Shirley Whittaker.

"I'm sure the Dare stones were around someplace," says Whittaker, who as a preschooler had been cast because she took dance and elocution lessons from the play's author. "But I don't remember them. I was too busy being impressed by the first real Indians I'd ever seen" - Cherokee tribesmen imported from North Carolina by the Pearces to lend the play more realism.

All that came to an end on April 26, 1941. The Saturday Evening Post, despite its Norman Rockwell covers, was one of the leading muckraking and investigative reporting journals. That day it published an article that systematically razed Brenau's house of historical stones. The writer, says Southerland, "all but accused Haywood Pearce Jr. of faking the stones himself."

Although there was talk of libel action against The Post and its New York writer, World War II seemed to put an end to the saga. The Dare Stones mysteriously disappeared from visibility on campus.

Periodically in the past decades interest in the stones comes back to life from time to time. You can see a slightly corpulent, more hirsute Southerland on grainy Internet broadcasts of a 1977 Leonard Nimoy In Search of... TV program in which the Brenau professor proclaims that all but that first stone probably are fakes. In another interview 10 years later he backed off, saying he was "perhaps a little generous" and there's a "50-50 chance" the first stone is a fake, too. In 1991 historian Robert W. White published A Witness for Eleanor Dare, a book debunking all the debunking and a subtitle proclaiming it to be "the final chapter in the 400-year-old mystery."

Interest revived again this spring as Jamestown, Va., prepared to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first English colony to gain purchase in the American soil. Fueled in part by something of an Internet scavenger hunt, one item for which was a rubbing from a Dare stone, dozens of people from around the country began contacting various Brenau officials.

One New Jersey teenager wrote naively that his family descended from the Dares. He wanted to visit Brenau en route to Disney World in Florida. A South Carolina museum asked to borrow a few of the rocks for a special exhibit about myths and legends. A more passionate true believer, Kyle R. Shultz, a 16-year-old Pennsylvanian who says he's penning a novel about the Roanoke Colony, initially demanded to know why such important artifacts "are kept from the public." He wrote that, "If my sources are correct, these stones are concealed in an 18th Century mausoleum on the campus."

Although neither Brenau nor the city of Gainesville and environs existed in the 18th century, technically speaking , most of Brenau's pet rocks were at the time underground. And they're protected by "a Jedi." Their home, however, was not a crypt, but the basement boiler room under the stage of the university amphitheater, the only facility capable of housing 45 rocks that weigh from 20 to 40 pounds each. The "Jedi" caretaker is Jediah Carling, maintenance specialist. One stone is on view at the Northeast Georgia History Center adjacent to the campus. Two - including that first one - are in the special collections section of the Trustee Library. Southerland and Debbie Thompson, campus traditions director, plan to dust the stones off and put them on exhibit by fall semester.

But brace yourselves: the story is about to take a new direction. Part of the Eleanor Dare legend is that she gave birth to another daughter, Agnes, fathered by an American Indian "king" from North Carolina or Georgia where the tribes believed spirits of the dead took up residence in sacred stones.

Kathy Amos, a professional storyteller who is the university's tradition keeper, points out that Brenau's resident ghost, named Agnes, didn't show up on campus until after the Dare stones did.

But let the chills along your spine settle. We'll save that shaggy rock story for another day.

IF YOUR CURIOSITY PORTAL IS STILL OPEN

Check out these Lost Colony/Dare stone resources:

Brenau's top entertainment rival in the early Dare stone days was the outdoor pageant that has been a tourist attraction on North Carolina's Outer Banks for decades. http://www.thelostcolony.org/

A Witness for Eleanor Dare, by Robert W. White. This 1991 tome that was to be the final word in proving the historic authenticity of Brenau's "pet rocks' is out of print. But you can still find copies online.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaqG6rC4hIw In Search of...The Lost Colony of Roanoke episode. Narrated by Leonard Nimoy, this 1977 television program features Brenau's own Dr. Jim Southerland.

The small North Carolina publisher Press 53 just released a new edition of Marjorie Hudson's Searching for Virginia Dare. Hudson, who researched some of her book at Brenau, draws no final conclusions on the stones' authenticity, but she doesn't handle them with kid gloves, either.

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With focus on the 400th anniversary of America's first permanent English settlement, interest revived in Brenau's unique trove of hand-carved rocks that could hold key clues to solving one of the Americas' greatest mysteries - what happened to 'The Lost Colony' of Roanoke.

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New Clues to Lost Colony Disappearance (website)

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New Clues to Lost Colony Disappearance (website)

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Description:
This article discusses a possible new theory of what possibly happened to the lost colony. The article proposes, that based on newly found artifacts that the group actually split into two new colonies and assimilated themselves into different native american communities.

analysis:
Based on pottery and other different items found within the area. The archaeologists hypothesized that they probably assimilated with Native Americans but kept their belongings. This is why colony artifacts where found on native american land. This displays the belief of ideology. I think that archaeologists have a certain way of thinking, and by finding artifacts here and there they can create a reasonable explanation based on their thinking. Confusion of correlation can also be applied to this article,  I think there could be different reasons as to why Roanoke artifacts were discovered on native american land but it doesn't necessarily mean that they assimilated with their community.

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When John White, appointed by Sir Walter Raleigh as governor of Roanoke Colony, returned to England for more supplies in late 1587, he left behind his wife, his daughter and his infant granddaughter-Virginia Dare, the first child born in the New World to English parents-among the other settlers. Upon White's return in 1590, he found no trace of his family or the other inhabitants of the abandoned colony. Over the centuries to come, archaeologists, historians and explorers would delve into the mystery of the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke, all failing to find definitive answers.

Based on the scant clues left behind, some speculated that Native Americans attacked and killed the English colonists. "Croatoan" was the name of an island south of Roanoke, now Hatteras Island, which at the time was home to a Native American tribe of the same name. Alternatively, they might have tried to sail back to England on their own and been lost at sea, or been killed by hostile Spaniards who came north from their own settlements in Florida. One enduring theory was that the settlers might have been absorbed into friendly Native American tribes, perhaps after moving further inland into what is now North Carolina.

Stock Montage/Getty Images

Two independent teams found archaeological remains suggesting that at least some of the Roanoke colonists might have survived and split into two groups, each of which assimilated itself into a different Native American community. One team is excavating a site near Cape Creek on Hatteras Island, around 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of the Roanoke Island settlement, while the other is based on the mainland about 50 miles to the northwest of the Roanoke site.

Cape Creek, located in a live oak forest near Pamlico Sound, was the site of a major Croatoan town center and trading hub. In 1998, archaeologists from East Carolina University stumbled upon a unique find from early British America: a 10-carat gold signet ring engraved with a lion or horse, believed to date to the 16th century. The ring's discovery prompted later excavations at the site led by Mark Horton, an archaeologist at Britain's Bristol University, who has been directing volunteers with the Croatoan Archaeological Society in annual digs since 2009. Recently, Horton's team found a small piece of slate that seems to have been used as a writing tablet and part of the hilt of an iron rapier, a light sword similar to those used in England in the late 16th century, along with other artifacts of European and Native American origin. The slate, a smaller version of a similar one found at Jamestown, bears a small letter "M" still barely visible in one corner; it was found alongside a lead pencil.

In addition to these intriguing objects, the Cape Creek site yielded an iron bar and a large copper ingot (or block), both found buried in layers of earth that appear to date to the late 1500s. Native Americans lacked such metallurgical technology, so they are believed to be European in origin. Horton told National Geographic that some of the artifacts his team found are trade items, but it appears that others may well have belonged to the Roanoke colonists themselves: "The evidence is that they assimilated with the Native Americans but kept their goods."

The Trustees of the British Museum

A watercolor map drawn by none other than John White inspired the search at Site X (as it's known), located on Albemarle Sound near Edenton, North Carolina, some 50 miles inland. Known as La Virginea Pars, the map shows the East Coast of North America from Chesapeake Bay to Cape Lookout; it is housed at the British Museum as part of its permanent collection. White began drawing the map in 1585, two years before he became governor. In 2012, researchers using X-ray spectroscopy and other imaging techniques spotted a tiny four-pointed star, colored red and blue, concealed under a patch of paper that White used to make corrections to his map. It was thought to mark the location of a site some 50 miles inland, which White alluded to in testimony given after his attempted return to the colony. If such a site did exist, the theory went, it would have been a reasonable destination for the displaced Roanoke settlers.

According to archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti of the First Colony Foundation, which is conducting the excavations at Site X, the group has found shards of pottery that they claim may have been used by Roanoke settlers after they left the colony. Located nearby is a site that archaeologists believe might have been a small Native American town, Mettaquem. After the Roanoke colony met its end, English settlers eventually came south from Virginia into North Carolina, but the first recorded settler in the area did not arrive until about 1655. But the recently uncovered pottery is in a style called Border Ware, which is typical of the pottery dug up on Roanoke Island, as well as at Jamestown, but was no longer imported to the New World after the early 17th century, when the Virginia Company dissolved.

In addition to the Border Ware pottery, archaeologists at Site X discovered various other items, including a food-storage jar known as a baluster, pieces of early gun flintlocks, a metal hook of the sort used to stretch animal hides or tents and an aglet, a small copper tube used to secure wool fibers before the advent of the hook and eye in the 17th century. Based on his team's findings, Luccketti thinks the Roanoke colonists may have moved inland to live with Native American allies sometime after White left, and these artifacts might have been among their belongings. As reported in the New York Times, the First Colony Foundation will reveal more about its findings and theory this week in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Though the newly announced discoveries don't solve this lingering historical mystery, they do point away from Roanoke Island itself, where researchers have failed to come up with evidence pointing to the Lost Colony's fate. Archaeologists on both teams are hoping that a detailed study of their new finds will yield more clues, and-of course-that more evidence remains, waiting to be discovered, in the endless layers of dirt that surround them.

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Archaeologists Find New Clues to "Lost Colony" Mystery

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When John White, appointed by Sir Walter Raleigh as governor of Roanoke Colony, returned to England for more supplies in late 1587, he left behind his wife, his daughter and his infant granddaughter-Virginia Dare, the first child born in the New World to English parents-among the other settlers.

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Description:
In 1998 excavators discovered a worn ring with a prancing lion imprinted on it. This ring was believed to be linked to the lost colony. The ring was discovered to be brass and most likely a mass produced item that was traded on the east coast. Skepticism came with the discovery of the ring as it was found with items produced long after the lost colony.

Analysis:
This article is a good example of the bias of perception and observation. As well the article displays examples of an emotional connection.  When the ring was initially discovered it was assumed to be 18k gold. Initially they thought that the ring was made of precious materials that related back to the Elizabethan era. The ring related to other materials that had been discovered from the era, helping to affirm their beliefs of the relation to the colony. Because of this initial assumption I think it skewed the perception of the ring and altered the observations. The article stated that "everyone wanted it to be something that a lost colonist dropped in the sand." The emotional connection behind this sentence plays into the fact that researchers will believe certain facts over others because they wanted this to be a legit artifact from the lost colony. This also created some motivation to convince people that the ring was from the lost colony because it would help to confirm the many theories of what happened to the colony and determine where they settled.

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An artifact found 20 years ago turns out to not be what archaeologists thought

smithsonian.com

It seemed too good to be true. And it was.

Nearly 20 years ago, excavators digging on North Carolina's remote Hatteras Island uncovered a worn ring emblazoned with a prancing lion. A local jeweler declared it gold-but it came to be seen as more than mere buried treasure when a British heraldry expert linked it to the Kendall family involved in the 1580s Roanoke voyages organized by Sir Walter Raleigh during Elizabeth I's reign.

The 1998 discovery electrified archaeologists and historians. The artifact seemed a rare remnant of the first English attempt to settle the New World that might also shed light on what happened to 115 men, women, and children who settled the coast, only to vanish in what became known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

Now it turns out that researchers had it wrong from the start.

A team led by archaeologist Charles Ewen recently subjected the ring to a lab test at East Carolina University. The X-ray fluorescence device, shaped like a cross between a ray gun and a hair dryer, reveals an object's precise elemental composition without destroying any part of it. Ewen was stunned when he saw the results.

"It's all brass," he said. "There's no gold at all."

North Carolina state conservator Erik Farrell, who conducted the analysis at an ECU facility, found high levels of copper in the ring, along with some zinc and traces of silver, lead, tin and nickel. The ratios, Farrell said, "are typical of brass" from early modern times. He found no evidence that the ring had gilding on its surface, throwing years of speculation and research into serious doubt.

"Everyone wants it to be something that a Lost Colonist dropped in the sand," added Ewen. He said it is more likely that the ring was a common mass-produced item traded to Native Americans long after the failed settlement attempt.

Not all archaeologists agree, however, and the surprise results are sure to reignite the debate over the fate of the Lost Colony.

The settlers arrived from England in the summer of 1587, led by John White. They rebuilt an outpost on Roanoke Island, 50 miles north of Hatteras, abandoned by a previous band of colonists. White's group included his daughter Eleanor, who soon gave birth to Virginia Dare, the first child born of English parents in the New World.

White quickly departed for England to gather supplies and additional colonists, but his return was delayed by the outbreak of war with Spain. When he finally managed to land on Roanoke Island three years later, the settlement was deserted. The only clue was the word "Croatoan" carved on a post, the name of a tribe allied with the English and the island now called Hatteras.

ECU archaeologist David Phelps, now deceased, found the ring while excavating a Native American village there and took it to a jeweler named Frank Riddick in nearby Nags Head. Phelps reported that the jeweler tested the ring and determined it was 18-carat gold.

Riddick, who now runs a fishing charter company called Fishy Bizness, recalled recently that he didn't conduct an acid-scratch test typically used to verify the presence and quality of the precious metal. "Since this wasn't about buying or selling, we didn't do that," he said. "I just told him that I thought it was gold." Phelps apparently didn't want to subject the object to potential damage.

A senior member of London's College of Arms subsequently noted that the seal on the signet ring was of a lion passant, and suggested that it might relate to the Kendall family of Devon and Cornwall. A Master Kendall was part of the first colonization attempt in 1585, while another Kendall visited Croatoan when a fleet led by Sir Francis Drake stopped by in 1586. Though this link was never confirmed, the object was nicknamed the Kendall ring.

Since Phelps thought the ring was made of a precious material and likely belonged to the Elizabethan era, he argued it was an important clue. "That doesn't mean the Lost Colony was here," he told a reporter at the dig site after the ring's discovery. "But this begins to authenticate that."

Some archaeologists, however, were skeptical of the artifact's connection to Roanoke, given that it was found with other artifacts dating to between 1670 and 1720-about a century after the Elizabethan voyages. This was also an era in which brass rings showed up at Native American sites up and down the East Coast.

But Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, says that Ewen's results don't necessarily preclude that it belonged to a Roanoke colonist. "The fact that the ring is brass actually makes it more similar to other British examples," he said, noting that the ring could have been made in the 1580s. "I would argue that it was kept as an heirloom, passed down, and then discarded."

Horton is currently digging at the Hatteras site where the ring was discovered. The excavations, sponsored by the Croatoan Archaeological Society, have so far uncovered several artifacts that may have been made during Elizabethan times, including the handle of a rapier and bits of metal from clothing.

If the Lost Colonists left Roanoke for Croatoan in the late 1580s, argues Horton, they might have brought along their most precious objects. Over a couple of generations they may have assimilated with the Algonquian-speaking Croatoan people and their English heirlooms would have eventually worn out. "Oh, there's granddad's old sword in the corner rusting away," said Horton. "Why are we keeping that?"

His theory is also based on archaeological finds that show that Native Americans on Hatteras manufactured lead shot and used guns to hunt deer and birds by the 1650s. Prior to this, their diet was based heavily on fish and shellfish. The technological sophistication, Horton suggests, hints at the presence of Europeans before the second wave of English arrived in the area in the late 1600s. That, too, could point to the presence of assimilated colonists and their descendants.

That theory is a stretch, says archaeologist Charles Heath, who worked with Phelps and was present when the ring was found. "Such items would have been used, modified, traded, re-traded, lost, discarded or curated by their native owners-and subsequent native owners-for many years," he argued. In the end, he said, "a stray 16th-century artifact found here and there on the Outer Banks will not make for a Lost Colony found."

Horton acknowledges that rather than Roanoke colony possessions brought along by assimilating English, the Croatoan people could have acquired the goods from Jamestown, the later Virginia colony to the north, instead. Gunflints, coins, and glass beads found at the site almost certainly came from the newer English settlement. But he is confident that the current excavations will soon reveal additional evidence.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the Lost Colony continues. Another group of archaeologists working about 50 miles west of Roanoke Island at the head of Albemarle Sound say that they have pottery and metal artifacts likely associated with the Lost Colony. The digs by the First Colony Foundation were sparked by the 2012 discovery of a patch concealing the image of a fort on a map painted by John White.

But like the finds at Hatteras, the objects might be associated with the second wave of English settlement.

Last fall, a dig by the National Park Service at Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island-thought to be the site of the original settlement-yielded no trace of the colonists. But earlier in 2016, archaeologists did find a handful of fragments of an apothecary jar that almost certainly date from the 16th century.

That the gold Kendall ring is likely a cheap brass trade item won't derail the quest to find out what took place on the Outer Banks more than four centuries ago. As for Ewen, he hopes that the analysis of the ring will help put researchers back on track in their search for scarce clues to the Roanoke settlers. "Science actually does work," he said-"if you give it time."

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The Mystery of Roanoke Endures Yet Another Cruel Twist

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smithsonian.com It seemed too good to be true. And it was. Nearly 20 years ago, excavators digging on North Carolina's remote Hatteras Island uncovered a worn ring emblazoned with a prancing lion.

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Description:
This picture is of the tree that was found by John White on Roanoke island after returning from his expedition back to Britiain for more supplies for the colony. The complete word "Croatoan" was found etched into the tree and a nearby tree displayed "CRO." This was the only evidence that remained of the lost colony.

Analysis:
John White believed that this meant that the colony had left to live on the nearby Croatoan island. These etching display the red flag of "confirmation bias." Upon his return two years later, John White assumed that the colony had moved or been absorbed by other tribes within the area. Seeing this single word etched into the tree could have virtually meant anything, but John made an assumption that aligned most with his beliefs. He decided it meant that the colony had uprooted and moved to the island. Due to circumstances though John was never able to find out the truth and re-unite with his grand daughter.

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Map of the Lost Colony Settlement (Picture)

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Map of the Lost Colony Settlement (Picture)

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Description:
This map shows the area within North Carolina where the lost colony settled. On this map you can see the approximate area where the colony settled in Roanoke. You can also see Croatoan, which was theorized to be one of the places that the colony relocated to during the two years that John White had travelled back home to gather more supplies.

Analysis:
I think this map displays the reason for belief of the "unexplained." It was never determined what actually happened to the lost colony and relocation was only one possible theory. This map can provide a bit of context to the situation but in the end it's a mystery that will never be truly solved.  Simplicity could also be applied to this image because I think it was easy for John White when he returned to see "Croatoan" etched into a tree and immediately an think that they had relocated there. There is no simple answer to what happened to the colony but it can be easy to make simple connections to come up with an answer.

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Description:
This picture displays the propose set up after the colony ha established themselves on Roanoke before the disappearance.  Another reason that it was proposed that the colony likely split into two tribes and joined with Native Americans is that these types of building appeared within native american colonies. These structures are an English style of building so it's very likely that surviving members of the lost colony were able to help implement these structures within the native american tribes they assimilated with.

analysis:
The belief of paternicity can be applied to this picture. Patterns of early construction started to appear over time throughout different parts of North Carolina. While structures appeared to be built the same way, this does not necessarily mean that the lost colony assimilated with Native Americans. One could argue that the native american wiped out the lost colony and then used their plans to build their own structures. It can be easy to see the pattern in the similarity of the structures and assume that it means that surviving members of the colony helped to build them but there may be other reasoning as well.