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The Roanoke Island colonists had the unbelievable bad luck to arrive in the middle of North Carolina's worst drought since the year 1200, according to recent research reports. Archaeologist Dennis B. Blanton of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, released information April 23, 1998, on his research with Matthew D. Therrell of the University of Arkansas.
Professors Blanton and Therrell studied the climate of eastern North Carolina and Virginia by examining the tree rings of old bald cypress trees growing in swamps along the Blackwater and Nottoway rivers just north of the Virginia-North Carolina border near Murfreesboro. Earlier, Therrell and his colleagues at Arkansas had studied general climate trends in the southeastern states by studying the tree rings of ancient bald cypress trees growing along the Black River in Pender and Bladen Counties, North Carolina.
Scientists studying ancient climates call themselves paleoclimatologists. One of their favorite techniques is to measure the relative width of tree rings from sections of ancient trees. The trees leave wider rings in wetter years and very narrow rings in dry years. The technique was honed in studies of climate in the southwestern states, which had a great effect on the fortunes of native American populations in that area.
The application of tree ring climatology to the southeast is relatively recent. Only in the last decade have scientists realized that some southeastern bald cypress trees are among the oldest trees in the country. The Black River bald cypresses are thought to be the oldest trees east of the Mississippi; some of them are more than 1500 years old. (Since these trees were discovered, the North Carolina Nature Conservancy has worked to assure their preservation.) The Virginia trees used in this recent study are somewhat younger, but still ancient: as much as 1000 years old.
Most historians believe that the Lost Colonists of 1587 left Roanoke Island to live with in alliance with native Americans near modern Norfolk, Virginia. They are believed to have survived there for many years, but they were killed in an attack by Powhatan shortly before the arrival of the Jamestown colonists in 1607. Blanton and Therrell suggest that it was drought that drove the colonists from their North Carolina homes.
Amazingly, the Jamestown settlers had the same bad luck as Sir Walter Raleigh's colony. They arrived in the second year of seven-year drought that lasted through 1612. This goes a long way toward explaining the famines that nearly wiped out the Jamestown settlement several times in its early years.
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Posted May 4, 1998. Features remain online as long as they remain current; they may be updated if new information becomes available.
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