Jamestown artifact

From WikiCover

A small piece of early American history will become the latest space traveler with the liftoff of NASA's Space Shuttle Atlantis. Atlantis is scheduled to launch Friday, June 8 at 7:38 p.m. EDT for the STS-117 mission to the International Space Station.

A nearly 400-year-old metal cargo tag bearing the words "Yames Towne" and some commemorative mementoes are packed in Atlantis' middeck floor cargo space for the roundtrip flight to the International Space Station. Their hitchhike through the galaxy honors this year's 400th anniversary of Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America.

"We found the tag at the bottom of a well during a dig at the James Fort," said William M. Kelso, director of archaeology at Historic Jamestowne for the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. "It appears to be a discarded shipping tag from a crate or trunk that arrived from England around 1611. The artifact clearly marks Jamestown as a destination -- our nation's first address."

When the one-inch in diameter artifact lands back on Earth, it will have logged more than four million miles spanning four centuries. It will have traveled from England to Jamestown, then to and from the space station.

NASA will return the shipping tag to Historic Jamestowne where it will join hundreds of other artifacts in a new archaeological museum called the Archaearium. Since 1994, archaeologists at the Jamestown Rediscovery project have dug up more than a million items, including the long-lost remains of James Fort. For centuries, the fort was believed to have eroded into the James River.