JAMESTOWN, Va. — The dig site where archaeologist Sean Romo has just found the ancient fragment of armor is surrounded by a double layer of green sandbags to keep out water.
A dig site nearby is covered by a grate where a tarp can be quickly spread if it starts to rain.
And out in the James River, barges filled with stone are waiting to bolster the century-old concrete sea wall that is failing under the relentless pressure of the river.
The 400-year-old colonial site here is losing its battle with climate change, experts say, and Wednesday the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed it on a list of the country’s most endangered historical places.
“Jamestown is a world-class archaeological site and a place of national and international significance,” said James Horn, president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, the nonprofit that conducts archaeology and cares for the original settlement site. (The trust listing does not include the adjacent National Park Service Jamestown location.)
The threat to the site of one of the nation’s “very first cultural hubs … brings home the challenges that climate change pose to our entire society,” he said.
Katherine Malone-France, chief preservation officer for the trust, said, “You’ve got resources there underwater, that are staying underwater.”
“Jamestown demonstrates that the threats to our cultural resources from a changing climate are incredibly urgent,” she said. “We have a five-year window to make an impact. … This isn’t something that can wait 10 or 15 years.”
“This is our collective heritage,” she said Monday.
The trust was chartered by Congress in 1949, and for the last 35 years it has issued a list of 11 historical sites endangered by things such as development, neglect, decay and exposure to weather.
Another spot struggling with climate change on this year’s list is Houston’s Olivewood Cemetery, Malone-France said.
It is a 140-year-old African American burial ground with more than 4,000 graves. It suffers from chronic erosion, and after a 2017 hurricane was under 10 feet of water.
Jamestown, in 1607, became the place of the first permanent English settlement in what would become the United States. The earth here holds the bones of hundreds of the early colonists and the artifacts that are clues to their lives.
It is also the place where, in 1619, the first enslaved Africans arrived, and where generations of Native Americans had already lived for centuries.