"I spoke too soon," she says as she bends down to retrieve a fingernail-size piece of creamware. Holding it to the light, she guesses it's 18th century, maybe 1760s. "But don't quote me," she says. "I'm a novice."
DOUG KAPUSTIN/AP
An intricately detailed shard from a vessel is one of Ripley's more
interesting finds.
This was one way Ripley helped discover that her property is probably the site of the lost 17th century village of Indian chief Powhatan and his famous daughter, Pocahontas.
Along the bluffs on a plateau high above the York River, where Ripley can look down to the shoreline of Purtan Bay where her husband, Bob, installed 500-pound rocks to save the marshes, the view is breathtaking.
"You can see why somebody important would want to live here," Ripley says.
The clues were there all along. Since the 1800s, with the discovery of a map drawn by Jamestown colonist Capt. John Smith, the village of the great Algonquian chief Powhatan was known to be on Purtan Bay, somewhere between two creeks.
Ripley's land is between two creeks on the bay, too.
That it might be the lost village of Werowocomoco was mentioned in the literature provided by a real estate agent when Ripley and her husband bought the land in 1996. But other property owners on the bay claimed that, too, and the possible historic value was not the reason they were drawn to it.
The property is beautiful, and it is private. The house on the river is surprisingly small for land so vast, but grand in a Virginia gentry way. The only noise is the singing of birds and the rustle of leaves. Wild turkey, geese and deer live in the woods, and the land is surrounded by water on three sides .
The Ripleys are outdoors people. Ripley, 57, enjoys the wildflowers. Her husband, 59, a retired lawyer and developer, had wanted a place his whole life where he could step outside his door and go hunting.
The first winter, Ripley and her husband cleared the woods of vines that obstructed their view to the river. The following spring, walking in the woods, trying to decide where to put a path, they found liquor bottles, mayonnaise jars, and wire they feared could hurt their dog.
As Ripley began clearing the debris, she noticed broken glass in many places: by the walnut grove, in the fields, along the river. One day she found her first artifact: a piece of pottery, about 2 inches long, 1-1/2 inches wide, brownish blue with white stripes. It was sitting on the ground by a tree.
Then she found her first arrowhead, beige with dark markings. She brought it inside, hollering to her husband, "Look what I found!"
Then came a tiny piece of Indian pottery.
Sometimes, the things she found were lying on the dirt, a bare spot in weeds or woods. Sometimes they were hidden.
She still picked up broken glass, but now she hoped to find something more significant. She was hooked.
Ripley stored her earliest arrowheads in shoeboxes. A woodworking shed became her office. She moved in three tables: a long one the family had used for shelling crabs, another she had used for laundry, and a conference table from her husband's former law office. When she ran out of shoeboxes, she bought three fishing-lure boxes at Wal-Mart. Then, three more. Soon she had dozens.
"What in the world are you going to do with all this junk?" her husband asked. "What are you saving it for?"
She didn't know.
On rainy days when she couldn't go out, she played with her finds at the dining room table. She'd lay everything out and try to piece together pottery or glass. Often the pieces she matched had been found all over the property, scattered by plows from more than 300 years of farming.
It was obvious, from all the arrowheads and pottery Ripley found, that Indians had lived on the land, and at first, she and her husband joked. "Powhatan could have eaten out of this," she'd say. Or, admiring the white clay pipes she found, "I wonder if John Smith smoked these."
Ripley studied American Indians in fourth grade and visited Williamsburg with her class. Her mother, who taught Virginia history, took her and her brothers to Jamestown when it was unearthed.
Originally she had wanted to be an anthropologist, the kind that digs in the dirt. In her fantasy, she was in Peru, discovering remains of Incan pyramids. Marriage interfered with her college plans. When her sons were grown, she took on jobs for which she had no training and succeeded at them: property manager, social services case officer, interior designer, and clerk in her husband's office.
Now though, besides finding artifacts, she painted the porch, wallpapered the bathroom, took evening walks with her husband.
Normal is how she would have described her life the first five years on the property.
It wasn't until September 2001 that Ripley and her husband looked at each other and thought, "Oh, boy, this could be significant."
The Gloucester area had been surveyed in the early 1970s, and local archaeologists were contacting homeowners to see if they wanted copies of field notes from the unfinished project. Ripley said yes. She was sitting on the porch talking with archaeologists David Brown, Thane Harpole and Anthony Smith when they asked to see her collection of artifacts.
When she opened her workshop to show them what she had collected, no one spoke. Slowly, they passed pieces back and forth. It wasn't only the amount of American Indian pottery she had found that amazed them, one of them, Harpole, would say, but the large size of the pieces. Could they be from Powhatan's village? They asked to bring in a friend, E. Randolph Turner III, an expert on early American Indians.
Turner, a regional director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, had been studying Virginia archaeology for 30 years and for most of that time, he'd been trying to get on this property. Whenever he came, nobody was home. Across the river, he'd studied a huge farm called Purtan Plantation for signs of Powhatan, and found none.
When he stepped from his car, Turner was wearing a big smile. The site was exactly what he imagined it would look like, the couple recall him saying. It was a setting worthy of a man who ruled what was then the most complex entity in northeastern North America.
Powhatan's two temples nearby were similarly placed high on a cliff above the water. Coastal Virginia was mostly flat, so the dramatic landscape conveyed power, especially to those approaching by water.
Ripley pulled out an arrowhead, which Turner identified as from the late Woodland period -- the time leading up to the arrival of the English. He was explaining how it differed from those made in the time before Christ when she pulled a second arrowhead from another box. "Like this?"
She showed him some pipe fragments, which he admired and suggested were European. She pulled out a larger pipe stem she kept in a box of junk. She guessed it was more recent, and had dismissed it as not as important. Turner stared and stared. It was from the Woodland period, he told her, and clearly Indian.
Later, when the chiefs of five of the eight Indian tribes in Virginia came to visit her, one of them would pick up the pipe and try to imagine Powhatan smoking it.
She wracked her brain to remember things she might have thrown away. If she found so much on top of the soil, what lay beneath it?
In the spring and summer last year, with the Ripleys paying the bill, local archaeologists dug 603 pits on a 50-acre section of the land. They found artifacts in 510 of them.
Ripley has accepted the College of William & Mary's invitation to audit classes in archaeology in the fall. "I love it. I should have been doing it all my life."
Walking on her driveway one recent day she picked up a piece of old gravel because she saw it was pointy on one end. She picks up everything now.
"You never know," she says.