ARCHEOLOGISTS FIND TRACES OF JAMESTOWN'S ORIGINAL FORT.

Byline: John Noble Wilford The New York Times

On May 13, 1607, the first successful English settlement in what is now the United States got off to an unsteady start at a swampy island in a broad tidal river. The 104 settlers of the Virginia Company named the place James Fort, later Jamestown, after the sovereign.

This was the colony where Capt. John Smith made his name in history and Pocahontas, a young daughter of the powerful Indian chief Powhatan, became a legend befriending the beleaguered English and supposedly rescuing Smith from death.

Looking back from the 19th century, the orator Edward Everett spoke of the Jamestown fort in tidewater Virginia as the place ``where the first germs of the mighty republic . . . were planted.''

All traces of the original fort, however, had been lost for more than two centuries. The log fort burned a year after it was built. Buried remains of the wall, along with any weapons, ceramics and other artifacts, were thought to have been washed away by changing currents of the James River.

Anything of the first structures at the first permanent English settlement in America seemed beyond recovery.

But archeologists announced Thursday that the lost had been found. In recent excavations, they uncovered stains of decayed wood where they said logs of the palisade wall had stood in the ground.

From this they established the three-sided fort's footprint, determining the outlines of a rounded bastion at one of the three corners and the angle at which the walls were joined. Archeologists said these observations conformed exactly with contemporary written descriptions of the original fort.

Archeologists also reported finding traces of two buildings within the fort, evidence of glassmaking and copper-working industries there and thousands of other artifacts, including swords, armor, a smoking pipe, jewelry, ceramics and coins.

A grave at the site held the well-preserved skeleton of a white man in his early 20s who probably died of a gunshot wound, a fate raising intriguing questions about murder or mutiny or other tempests in the early colony.

In making the official announcement at Jamestown Island, Virginia Gov. George Allen declared, ``We have discovered America's birthplace - the original fort.''

Dr. William Kelso, the director of archeology of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, which owns the site and supported the excavations, said in a telephone interview that the artifacts should afford historians a clearer view of ``a very early Colonial society'' in the time of Queen Elizabeth I and her successor, James I.

Among the most interesting finds, Kelso said, were dozens of sky-blue glass beads apparently manufactured by the colony for trade with the Indians. ``John Smith got himself out of hot spots by trading these beads,'' he said.

The project, which is also supported by the National Geographic Society, is expected to excavate most of the site of the one-acre fort and surrounding town ruins by the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, in 2007.

``Any time we get early Colonial artifacts, it's important,'' said Dr. James Axtell, a historian at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who specializes in the study of early encounters between Europeans and American Indians.

``There's also the symbolic significance here. Jamestown represents the founding of Virginia and of English America, even though other places are better examples of successful colonization.''

Indeed, if John Rolfe, who married Pocahontas, had not developed a hybrid tobacco in 1613 that won a ready market in London and the first economic boost for the colony, historians say, Jamestown would have become just another Colonial failure.

An earlier English settlement, in 1584 at Roanoke Island, which is now part of North Carolina, was a disastrous failure. In 1562, French Huguenots had no more luck with their Charlesfort, the site of which on the South Carolina coast was discovered earlier this year.