Berkeley Plantation, VA: The autumn sun was rapidly dropping toward the broad James River when two pieces of reddish baked clay, each not much larger than a thumbnail, emerged from the Virginia mud. Mark Horton, an archaeologist from the UK’s University of Bristol, gave the fragments a lick with his tongue and peered closely at tiny patterns incised into the objects. After a moment’s pause, he said, “We are looking for a needle in a haystack—I wonder if this is it!”

Horton’s needle is physical evidence from the site of the first English Thanksgiving in the New World—one that took place five hundred miles south of Plymouth Rock and nearly two years earlier. Here, just thirty miles upstream from Jamestown,