Thursday, January 30, 2014

Dumbfound Discovery in D.C.


Over the summer, my family and I went to Washington D.C.. We went to countless amounts of museums and saw extraordinary things like the Wright Brothers first plane and the gun that killed President Lincoln.



While I was in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, I was going through an exhibit that featured many things from the earliest settlements of the new world called "Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake". When I first entered the exhibit, I looked over to my right and was blown away by the scene of the mold of a skull that appeared to be carved or dug into with a sharp object.


http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/05/01/scientists-find-evidence-cannibalism-at-jamestown/
I walked over to the display. Next to the skull in the glass was a wax mold of a young ladies head and shoulders. She looked young and was in a position where you could see everything about her.




I looked over to the poster that was next to the display. It said in large letters "Jane of Jamestown." I thought to myself; Jamestown, I remember vaguely learning about that in fifth grade. Underneath the title described what was in the display and what scientists had discovered happened to her and many others during "the starving times" of Jamestown.


Many of the settlers from Jamestown were starving to death and had become very desperate so they resulted to the last possible solution that they could think of; cannibalism. They would dig up dead bodies that they had buried and they would eat them.



In history class this year we learned about early Jamestown and we were asked a very complex question. That question was "Why did so many colonists die during early Jamestown?"


This connects to that question and what we learned about in class because this proves that one of the answers to that question was because of starvation. The starvation was so bad during this time that the settlers had to refer to eating their deceased.


I think that the discovery of cannibalism at Jamestown was a very significant discovery and will open up many doors in both the historic world and the scientific world. It will open up many doors because people will maybe think of cannibalism as a possible answer to some of their questions for other problems. Also, because many scientists can use this type of technology to help figure out many more historic mysteries.

9 comments:

  1. I thought you did a very good job of connecting what we learned in class to a real experience you had. It was very interesting to see all of the different pictures of "Jane of Jamestown", and find out all of the facts that scientists were able to uncover about Jamestown, just based on this one discovery. One improvement I would make to this piece is that I wouldn't have included the information about the other things you saw in the Smithsonian. Even though those extra pieces of information are interesting, they aren't related to the subject of the blog post. Overall, great job tying what we learned into a real life experience!

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  2. Your post was did a very good job at not only making connections to in class info and your personal experience, but to make it interesting to read as well. The way you made your post flow well as if you were retelling it as a story draws away from the essay aspect of the assignment, but still delivered key facts. One critique is to perhaps go into some more detail on the class-side connections. I think you should cover more on the DBQ we did to make an even stronger connections.

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  3. I really liked your piece. The pictures interested me a lot and made me wonder and want to finish reading your piece. I loved the way you connected it to today. I also liked how you set the scene in the first paragraph.

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  4. This was a fantastic article. I really enjoyed because the content was so striking to me. It provided new insight to the struggles of Jamestown. The pictures where great representations of the images this exhibit represented. Overall good post.

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  5. I like how you wrote about a place that you have actually been to. Knowing that the English were resorting to cannibalism, it seems very hypocritical of them to refer to the Native Americans as savages. The pictures were also nice, and did a great job of getting the point across that they were eating actual human beings.

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  6. I really like how you connected this to an experience that you had personally. The connection to class was very well thought out. Also, I love the pictures you used from the museum. Good job!

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  7. I liked how you used a personal example to help prove your point, and the pictures were really good! This is a very interesting topic and I imagine it must have been difficult to work with but you did a very good job!

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  8. This post was really interesting because while we learned about how horrible the lives of the Jamestown settlers was in class, we never really talked about them being cannibals. I like that you have lots of pictures, but I think it might have been more interesting if the pictures were of different things instead of just the one woman (also, one of your pictures is broken). I think you could have talked more about how it connected to class and what we have done in class about Jamestown. Overall, I really liked your post. Good job!

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  9. Pat,
    I really enjoyed reading your blog post. You used a lot of sensory detail which allowed me to take your place as you saw the artifacts described in your writing. I imagined seeing the museum pieces quite vividly (of course, the pictures helped), and I felt the history contained in them. The only suggestion I have is to make your writing seem more like you're telling a story, rather than just several thoughts as you walked around the museum. Overall, though, excellent piece of writing!
    -Travis

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