[buzzing]
My name is Jonathan Appell, and I was brought in
to take a look at this historic tomb that had been placed on the floor,
embedded into concrete since the early 1900s.
It all started with an email that was sent to me,
and I followed up on that,
and as soon as I heard it was at Jamestown,
I became very interested, because everyone's heard of Jamestown.
So I went back and forth and fortunately was able
to schedule a quick visit here in person.
I was able to come in and take a look
at this beautiful tomb and study it pretty closely.
And what I thought was going to be a quick visit
ended up being an hour-plus discussion about how we could deal with freeing it
from the concrete and moving it and then conserving it.
So we started here yesterday morning, trying to free this tomb
from the cement it was set in.
There was very hard Portland cement, colored darkly,
along the top edge, kind of acting as a protective skirt around it.
Now, Portland cement became a very common
and very widely used material in the early 1900s,
and unfortunately it was used in many different ways,
incorporated into historic materials,
and a great number of historic buildings have been detrimentally affected
by Portland cement being combined with historic building materials
that are much more-- that are softer, that are more porous,
that have different characteristics.
And so they really shouldn't be combined.
I was able to grind it free from that concrete and then chisel under it,
and fortunately, they did us a great service by not embedding the entire slab
into wet, hard Portland cement-based mortar.
Instead, they set it on shims, on a brick pedestal
and slate shims, and then a lime mortar was used,
so it actually came out pretty easily once the concrete,
the hard Portland cement-based material, was removed.
It had been previously broken according to a picture from 1905.
A photograph or series of photographs fortunately were recovered.
And so once all the cement was removed around the edge and underneath,
hand-chiseled carefully, I was able to pry away individual fragments
one at a time, and remove them from the original setting.
And so we put them on this adapted kind of utility trailor.
I created a platform, and then we raised it by tipping it and putting it on the platform
and then getting planks under it, and then using rollers,
a kind of very simple version of something we know
at least the Egyptians used that far back
to basically push it up a ramp.
And with the help of a handful of strong individuals,
got it safely onto the platform without incident,
and we're all happy it's resting nicely here, awaiting conservation.
The next step is going to be to actually prepare each piece
to get them ready to be joined together again
so it can, you know, look like it did originally, basically, in its shape and everything.
And so in order to do so, we're going to have to clean
all the mating surfaces on the stone along the edges.
There's a lot of residue and old Portland cement repair material.
We also recovered some paper material that was under the surface,
and it appears that they used that to create a dam
and then poured liquid Portland cement, pigmented, into the joints
in order to use as infill and to close the joints cosmetically.
One of the defining things about it is there's no inscription on it,
because all of the lettering was inlaid in metal and unfortunately lost.
So it makes it very unusual, having no inscription
that could even be read under close analysis,
so we could only theorize based on the archaeology
and things that are found here on the site.
And that's what this is all about.
It's about the archaeology that's happening and the finds that are being uncovered.
And so that was the driving force to move this tomb from its location
that it had been placed in, in about 1905, so that they can dig under it.
And so it'll be interesting to see what is uncovered once the dig begins,
and these things take a lot of time and patience,
and it'll be exciting to see what's underneath.
The first thing that I noticed as soon as I brushed the dust off
is how incredibly beautiful the stone is.
It still has a radiance to it, and you can see,
especially with the natural light coming through the windows,
you know, reflecting the light, it still actually has a polish on it,
and that's after, you know, hundreds of years and multiple events,
and the structure has burned down and then was reconstructed.
The stone itself is in amazing condition.
So the age of this is unknown because the inscription is missing,
but it can be theorized, and maybe as more archaeology is done,
they'll have a better understanding of who this might be,
but if it was possibly one of the original founders,
George Yeardley, who passed away in 1627,
clearly that would be by far the oldest colonial gravestone in America.
And most of the earlier stones were not nearly as elaborate,
and I have never seen anything with extensive metalwork
from the 1600s, ever, anywhere.