Renowned British archaeologist Dr. Mark Horton and island native Scott Dawson have been teaming up to conduct archeological digs in Buxton and Frisco for years. Home of the friendly Croatoan tribe, the two have found mountains of evidence that demonstrate that the disappearance of the Lost Colony is not a mystery at all – they simply moved south to Hatteras Island.
“It’s funny that people still pretend that the colonists carved a mysterious word on a tree – ‘Croatoan’ – and no one knows what it means,” said Dawson, who also owns and runs the Lost Colony Museum in Buxton. “But it’s no secret. We know the real story. And we’re just trying to tell the truth because the Croatoans and their role in history should not be kept a secret.”
Over the course of dozens of digs, Dr. Horton and Dawson have collected countless pieces of evidence that the Europeans were mingling with the local Native Americans in the late 16th century, when the Lost Colony story takes place.
There are tools from repurposed bits of metal, a bronze Tudor rose, and a Nuremberg token, which is a casting counter that was used on 16th-century ships to count inventory.
There are also 900 pages of documents and thousands of close-to-home artifacts that make the Lost Colony and Croatoan connection, many of which are housed within the Buxton museum.
“When you look at all these artifacts side by side, and they have been found over the course of a decade, it tells the story that the [Lost] Colonists were living here,” said Dawson. “But there is a difference between knowing and proving it – and we never had a smoking gun, until now.”
As first announced by the UK media outlet Daily Mail, Dr. Horton and Dawson have uncovered massive amounts of hammserscales, which are tiny bits of metal that are only found at the site of blacksmith forges.
“You heat up an iron rod, and when you hit it, little pieces of metal fly off,” said Dawson. “It gets walked over and forms a little pile [of metal debris], and no one gives it any mind, except for us, 400 years later.”
These forges, where blacksmiths conducted their work, were not temporary sites. Instead, they were a permanent part of a European colony or settlement, and the fact that one existed on Hatteras Island – and was found in the 16th-century layer of an archeological dig site – shows that these Europeans weren’t visitors, but had settled and stayed.
“Elizabethan materials have been coming out of Hatteras since the 1990s, but this is the first time we have something that proves they’re living there, and it’s not just traded [items],” said Dawson.
“The English landed and lived on Hatteras in 1584. That’s when they met the now-famous Manteo. But those guys lived in military field tents, and it was a temporary military settlement from the start. I don’t think those guys would repurpose their wine glasses into arrowheads, or twisted door hinges into a drill. These are acts of desperation from the abandoned colony.”
“That’s likely not a shock to anyone,” he added. “The colonists wrote down where they were going on a tree for Pete’s sake. But we have real evidence here, backed by real science, and we shouldn’t have to fight to prove the fact that the Lost Colony isn’t ‘lost’ anymore.”
The discovery, which has elated both Dawson and Dr. Horton, was veritably hidden in plain sight for months.
There are multiple steps when it comes to facilitating and examining an archeological dig. The first step is to excavate material from the site itself, and remove all the big intact pieces like tools or weapons. The excavated material is sifted through a second time with mosquito netting, and then processed again with water to allow all the tiny items, like vegetable seeds, to float to the top.
The remaining mushy material is the residue, and it requires time, patience, and technology to process. Because of this time and technological commitment, Dawson had buckets of residue from previous 2024 digs just waiting to be scrutinized.
“We had clues there was a forge, because you’re seeing all this repurposed iron, like the nails or a repurposed gun barrel, and unless you’re Superman, you can’t twist steel,” said Dawson. “But we found the hammerscale in reverse order, and the amount of hammerscale is enormous – they must have been using this forge forever.”
“When we go through the [material] with a magnet, it just has an afro effect – there are clumps of black clinging to the magnet,” added Dawson. “And it’s not just a couple of flakes. Just from one residue bag – which is the size of a big Ziploc bag – there’s enough hammerscale to fill a whole Pepsi can.”
The magnet test is simple and effective, but science-backed tools and data were required to confirm the discovery. In this vein, Dr. Horton and Dawson sent animal teeth found in the same layer as the hammerscale to their partner lab at the University of California, Irvine, to have them tested and dated.
Sure enough, the teeth and adjacent hammerscale originated from the late 1500s, when the Lost Colonists were rumored to have disappeared into thin air.
“To say we were excited is an understatement,” said Dawson. “We finally had that ‘smoking gun’ evidence, so there is no need to keep regurgitating the fictional story that no one knows what happened to them.”
Dawson and the many archaeologists who assist in local Hatteras Island digs believe that the reason the Croatoan connection is typically left out of the story is because mysteries sell better.
The Lost Colony has been featured in a season of “American Horror Story,” has been included in a Stephen King book, and has been the subject of many television specials, where propelling the mystery makes the story more dangerous and exciting.
Unfortunately, the supposed mystery is also still taught in schools.
“Obviously the Hatteras schools knows better, but people in Virginia or even Raleigh don’t know, because they’ve always been told the mysterious ending that is in [The Lost Colony] play,” said Dawson. “Our main goal is to get the schools to stop saying ‘no one heard of this word before’ and ‘no one knows what happened.’ It leaves our tribe out of the story.”
Visitors who want to explore the story in depth can go to Dawson’s museum, where all of this accumulated evidence is on full display. In the meantime, Dawson is hopeful that this recent hammerscale discovery finally gives credence to the Croatoan tribe, and smashes a longstanding myth that has been disproven for some time.
“Our little project has grown over the years, to where we’re using radio carbon dating, and the [X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanner] and electrolysis to examine and date these finds, and the progression is just awesome,” said Dawson. “And this is the biggest news ever. Like Mark said in the Daily Mail, we finally have the smoking gun evidence we need to prove they were here.”
For more information on the Lost Colony Museum in Buxton, click here.
For commentary on Hatteras Island’s role in the history of the Lost Colony, click here.
