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– the first permanent English settlement in America – there's a distinctive black tombstone thought to mark the resting place of a knight. Now, researchers think they've figured out where the stone came from.
The research team, from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and the California Geological Survey, looked at the tiny shells of single-celled organisms embedded in the sedimentary rock to help place its source, using the microfossils to determine it originated from Belgium.
It's unlikely Jamestown's English settlers would have had either the tools or skills to make tombstones of this nature, suggesting the highly-polished ornament would have been imported.The combination of co-occurring microfossils excluded North America as an origin of the limestone slab, pointing instead to a place over the Atlantic, most like somewhere like Ireland of Belgium.
As far back as the Middle Ages, the members of the wealthy upper class in England had been commemorating their dead using these pricey tombstones, something the Jamestown settlers would have known about.
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