A lucky glance by an archaeologist walking in a field near Annapolis has led to the discovery of a 17th-century home site that may have belonged to the commander of Anne Arundel County's first settlement.
Archaeologists excavating the site in April discovered a broken plate bearing a blue design with the family crest of Edward Lloyd.
Lloyd founded the fort and trading post at Providence in 1649 and signed a treaty with the Susquehannock Indians in 1652.
It's the oldest, and "probably the most important Colonial site . . . found so far" in Anne Arundel County, said county archaeologist Al Luckenbach, who found the spot. "It provides our first glimpse of the first European residents of Anne Arundel County."
The extraordinary discovery of Lloyd's plate "is the functional equivalent of going to Jamestown and finding a plate belonging to Capt. John Smith," he said.
Henry M. Miller, chief archaeologist for Historic St. Mary's City, said that finding Lloyd's plate, with his family crest on it, "is absolutely astounding."
"I have not seen anywhere else on the East Coast a family plate with a monogram on it from that time period," he said. Some trade guilds in England had plates with crests on them, "but if families had them done, very few survived. It's quite rare."
Other finds at the site include an iron door key, an iron pestle used to grind corn, and a 17th-century iron ax head so sound that "you could sharpen it and mount it today and chop down a tree," Miller said.
But overall, the site was unusually poor in artifacts.
That scarcity, together with the apparent abandonment of valuable items, suggest that the home was occupied for a short time and abandoned in a hurry, Luckenbach said.
But why?
Fire is one possibility, Luckenbach said. "We kept looking for evidence of the place burning down, and it may have. But it hasn't made itself clear."
A more intriguing possibility is warfare.
In 1655, the mouth of the Severn River was the scene of fierce fighting. It pitted the Catholic forces of Lord Baltimore against Puritans led by Lloyd, who had settled at Providence after squabbling with the Anglican government of Virginia.
"There were probably not more than 500 or 600 armed troops," Miller said, "but, for the time and place, that is a huge engagement. In fact, the Battle of the Severn was probably the largest land engagement between Englishmen in North America in the 17th century."
