An Author Claims the Lost Colony of Roanoke Was Never Actually Lost—and He Can Prove It

Yahoo

16-05-2025

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:
The Lost Colony of Roanoke is one of the United States' most enduring mysteries.
An amateur archaeologists claims to have discovered proof of what happened to the colony members who completely vanished from the site.
Scott Dawson claims to have found 'hammerscale,' a byproduct of iron forging, on Hatteras Island, the home of the indigineous Croatoan people, suggesting the colony members lived alongside them.
This story is a collaboration with Biography.com
It's one of America's earliest and most enduring mysteries: what happened to the 'Lost Colony of Roanoke?'
Before the Revolution, even before Jamestown, an English colony was established in what is now North Carolina. Intended as an additional source of income for the kingdom, conditions quickly turned harsh and supplies ran short.
A representative of the colony set out for England to seek assistance; but while reports of possible hostilities with the Native population in the New World might have normally tugged at the sympathies of the Crown, a conflict brewing between England and Spain kept any aid from coming to the colony for three years. When help finally arrived, it arrived to find no one there to be helped. The colonists, and virtually all traces of the colony, were gone. A single palisade remained, with the word CROATOAN carved into it (the name of a nearby indigenous tribe).
In the centuries since, the mystery of what became of the colonists at Roanoke has inspired stories, films, and even a long-running theatrical production at the very site the colony once stood. But now, an author, museum owner, and self-described 'amateur archaeologist' claims to have solved this long-standing mystery. What's more, he asserts that there was no mystery at all, the colonists were never lost, and the whole story is merely 'a marketing campaign.'
And he believes his latest discovery is 'empirical evidence to prove it.'
Scott Dawson, the aforementioned author, museum proprietor, and president of the Croatoan Archaeological Society, did not find the buildings or the bodies that once populated the colony at Roanoke. But he, alongside archeologist and TV presenter Mark Horton, found some small flakes of rusted metal on Hatteras Island that they believe indicates the fate of the colonists who once lived 50 miles north at Roanoke.
These shavings, which the Daily Mail notes are 'barely larger than a grain of rice,' are known as hammerscale, a byproduct of iron-forging. The indigenous population who populated the area, the Croatoan, would not have been conducting the type of blacksmithing that would produce these shavings, asserts Horton.
But the English would have.
'The hammerscale shows that English settlers lived among the Croatoans on Hatteras and were ultimately absorbed into their community,' Horton remarked to the Daily Mail. 'Once and for all, this smoking gun evidence answers any questions about the supposed mystery of the lost colony.'
The pair have 'been digging near Buxton on the Croatoan Hatteras Island for more than a decade,' uncovering weapons and other European artifacts in the area, all of which have been put on display in Dawson's museum in Buxton (unrelated to the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, operated by the National Parks Service, whose museum sits adjacent to the original site of the colony). But they claim the hammerscale is more definitive proof than these previously found items, because 'coins and sword hilts could have got to Hatteras through trade or a passing settler.'
To them, it's obvious that the colonists would have relocated and taken up with the Croatoan. 'The lost colony narrative was a marketing campaign,' Dawson defiantly declared. '...and now we have empirical evidence to prove it.'
Dawson and Horton are not alone in the belief that the colonists went off to seek refuge with a friendly indigenous tribe. Many over the centuries have asserted such a conclusion; it even factors into the latest incarnation of the aforementioned theatrical production, 'The Lost Colony,' performed at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. In fact, it's one of the more prominent theories as to the fate of the colony, so Dawson and Horton are not alone in their 'assimilation' assertion.
However, they are also not alone in the pantheon of those confident that their latest archaeological discovery has solved the Lost Colony mystery 'once and for all.'
When the legend of the Lost Colony took hold in the United States during the 19th century, in a fervor toward forging a sense of national identity, the focus was on Virginia Dare, the first English (or as she was more often touted then, first 'white') child born in the New World. In many of the stories crafted around the colony in this time, it was suggested that the innocent colonists were killed by angry Natives, as though to suggest there was some original sin in the American experiment that could justify the genocide perpetrated against the indigenous population throughout the Age of Jackson.
That particularly bloody theory was 'confirmed' in the 1930s, with the 'discovery' of the so-called Dare Stones, a series of 48 carved stones which revealed that Virginia Dare and her father were killed by natives in 1591. But in 1941, Boyden Sparks of The Saturday Evening Post exposed these stones to be merely a hoax. And so, the mystery of the Lost Colony endured.
More recently, a different North Carolina-based archaeology group known as the First Colony Foundation made their own noteworthy and well-publicized discovery, when they revealed that a 400-year-old map featured a hidden fort, never-before-discovered. When they excavated that site, some distance from Roanoke at the Bal Gra plantation along Salmon Creek, they found what they felt was fairly compelling evidence that at least some of the colonists had, in fact, left the colony and went north, to this area they dubbed Site X, as opposed to Hatteras Island. In their book, Excavating the Lost Colony Mystery, the First Colony Foundation doesn't claim to have a 'smoking gun,' but instead lay out what they consider a prima facie argument in favor of their theory.
So, has the Lost Colony mystery been solved? In all honesty, probably. By someone, somewhere.
Now it's just a matter of figuring out whose solution that is.
You Might Also Like
The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape
The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere
Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?