Intrigued? You should be.
From the piece in National Geographic...
With the help of enhanced imagery and an expert in Elizabethan script, archaeologists are beginning to unravel the meaning of mysterious text and images etched into a rare 400-year-old slate tablet discovered this past summer at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America.
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As a writer you might be interested to know that, according to the Virginia Gazette, the senior archaeologist at Jamestown was unaware of the Thomas Harriot phonetic alphabet. He learned of it from an amateur volunteer who in turn learned of it from a Williamsburg writer who had published a biography of Harriot two years before. In the biography, the writer speculated that Captain John Smith and George Percy, two of the original adventurers, would have seen Harriot's work on the Algonquian language before they sailed to America. This writer showed the volunteer the phonetic alphabet during a lecture several months before the National Geographic article. The volunteer informed the archaeologist, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Williamsburg writer is Aleck Loker
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