Josie turned back to him. “That,” she said, “is the million-dollar question. And the answer is that until archeologists started finding remains of the old fort and of colonial life here, Jamestown was a place to commemorate Virginia’s British heritage, to celebrate our accomplishments and achievements in establishing the first permanent English colony in the New World. Also it was the first place a representative government existed in America.” She waved a hand like she was shooing a fly. “We sort of glossed over that pesky old conflict with the Indians and the fact that slavery also began here. The first African slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619. Sort of by accident, but still, it happened. All of that makes for a very different narrative.”

“The fort wasn’t discovered until the mid 1990s,” I said to Quinn. “Before then, everyone assumed it had disappeared into the river because of shifting tides and erosion.” I gave Josie a sidelong glance. “I do remember some history.”

She grinned again and Quinn said, “Wait. Do you mean until about twentysomething years ago no one knew where the Jamestown fort really was? You thought it was in the river somewhere? For almost four hundred years?”

Josie and I looked at each other. “More like three hundred,” she said.

“That’s still a long time to lose a valuable piece of American history, Virginia people,” Quinn said.

“Point taken, Mr. California,” I said. “Except it wasn’t lost. It was more like a miscalculation about where it was.”

“A miscalculation? Really?”

“However, we are making up for lost time.” Josie said in a bright voice. She pointed to a roped-off rectangular area that was about twenty by thirty feet. Inside a tarp covered what was clearly a pit; sandbags placed around the perimeter of the tarp kept it secure. “As you can see by all the tarps and fenced-off areas around here, this is still an active archeological site. For obvious reasons everything is covered up now to protect it from the weather. But if you come back in the spring you get a chance to watch the archeologists doing their work.”

“You said a lot of new things have been discovered since the quadricentennial,” I said.

Josie looked around as if she were trying to conjure a list. “That’s right. Since then they’ve uncovered the foundations of a couple of buildings that were inside the fort … the original church, the kitchen, the well. They also found structures in what was known as New Town.” She gestured behind us. “Plus they uncovered a couple of dump sites.”

“What’s a dump site?” Quinn asked.

We were heading toward a fretwork structure of slender logs located inside the perimeter of the triangle fort. It looked like the skeleton of a large building.