Shards of “Dragon bowl,” Jingdezhen, China, c. 1572-1620 at Jamestown Settlement.

The search for a richer story about Jamestown, the site of the first successful English settlement in North America, continues inside the Jamestown Rediscovery Research Center where over four million excavated artifacts and ecofacts are housed. In addition to illustrating documented people and events at Jamestown, the collections help interpret the unwritten past. These lost or discarded items were touched, treasured, traded, used, or broken by the people who helped lay the foundations of America’s birthplace.

Presented by Merry Outlaw, Senior Curator for Jamestown Rediscovery (Preservation Virginia), where, since 2015, she has overseen the stewardship of an archaeological collection of more than five million artifacts and helped develop a premier reference collection of seventeenth-century material culture used by scholars and emerging researchers.

Previously, she served as President of Archaeological & Cultureal Solutions, Inc. a Williamsburg-based cultural resource management firm, and as Curator of Collections at the former Virginia Research Center for Archaeology, where she identified and interpreted archelogical collections from Kingsmill Plantation and the Governor’s Land.

Outlaw edited “New Discoveries” for Ceramics in America for a decare and served on the Smithsonian exhibit team for Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th-Century Chesapeake (209-2014). In 2025, she published Following the Dragon: Late Ming Porcelain from James Fort, Jamestown, Virginia, exploring the global connections revealed by Chinese Ming porcelain recovered from the first permanent English settlement in North America.