While it may not go down as 'the day that will live in infamy,' the final CBS episode of the prime time drama Dallas airing Friday evening, March 21, 1980, will forever be a red letter day in television history. Arch-scoundrel J.R. Ewing, the conniving C.E.O. of the Ewing Oil empire, staggered backwards from a close-range gunshot blast to his chest. To the viewer no culprit was visible, just the contorted face of a man America loved to hate each Friday evening in the 9 p.m. time slot.

'Who shot J.R.?' was a headline on front pages of the best newspapers across the country. For fictional value, the script writers of Dallas, Linda Elstad and Leah Markus, managed what Poe, Hawthorne, and Hemingway could only have dreamed of -- a cliffhanger that made the world hold its collective breath for exactly eight months until the mystery killer was revealed. Indeed, this No. 1-rated television show mesmerized minds during the lackluster presidency of the 'man from Plains.'
For Jimmy Carter the Friday night tele-drama bumped his first major diplomatic act to page 2 in the papers. Five hours prior to the climactic Dallas episode, Carter had appeared on national tv to announce that the United States would boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. To his chagrin even the Europeans were talking about who had done in J.R.!
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance advised President Carter to boycott the Moscow Olympics as an economic sanction to Russia for its continued occupation of Afghanistan.
At the time it was all very boring. Friday night television viewers of the 1980s tuned in to Louis Rukeyser's 'Wall Street Week' on PBS and then flipped to CBS at 9 p.m. for Dallas.
The legacy of John Ross Ewing will remain as a highwater mark of CBS broadcast glory. 'Who shot JR' as a catch-phrase has quite a different ring in the world of archaeology, however. There's a whodunit murder mystery simmering up the coast on the Chesapeake, and it reads better than an Agatha Christie thriller!
Three-hundred and seventy-three years before we lost ourselves in the Dallas soap-opera intrigue, a real life murder unfolded in the fledgling Jamestown settlement of Virginia.
Now that wouldn't ordinarily concern us today were it not for the fact that archaeologists in 2005 uncovered at Jamestown the remains of a young gentleman with his lower left leg shattered by a 60-caliber musket ball.
Still, who cares about this trivia today? Uncovering surprising and disturbing little secrets from the past is part of what archaeologists do.
Thanks to a team of well-funded archaeologists of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, a group led by noted scholar William M. Kelso, and including the former director of the Historic Charleston Foundation, Carter Hudgins, the mists of time that have shrouded our understanding of that first successful English colony have parted with dramatic revelations.
What Kelso, Hudgins, and a dozen other superbly trained scientists searched for during the 1994-2005 celebrated dig was the footprint of the original fort's walls and as much relevant information on the day-to-day lives of the first settlers as possible. Kelso and company uncovered enough evidence to rethink our earlier conclusions about the awful struggle that the English met with on these shores in 1607.
Reports from earlier digs speculated that James Fort's location was partially underwater.
So, not only did Kelso, Hudgins, and team locate the old fort palisade foundation intact on high ground, but they also made considerable headway in uncovering the early social history of the settlement that has been lost through the ravages of times.
An accidental discovery just inside the fort's south wall of a human skeleton in a disintegrated hexagonal coffin generated as much excitement among the excavators as did the discovery of the fort's footprint. On an archaeological grid map, within a square labeled JR102C, these scientific historians carefully noted discovery of the remains of a gentleman in a traditional Christian, east-west burial plot.
A solitary Venetian trade bead was found amidst the rotten shards of the coffin and a .60-caliber lead bullet in the near-perfectly preserved skeleton. With trowels, dental picks, and tooth brushes the archaeologists brushed away more than just the sands of time -- they uncovered a dramatic moment in the earliest days of the Colony.
Their mystery victim would be known simply as 'JR' until positive identification of the remains and cause of death could be determined.
William Kelso is one of the country's most skilled archaeologists, and he has more scientific training than most historians, but he's also an engrossing writer in the way that he describes the solving of Jamestown's 'Who shot JR' -- a four-century old conundrum.
The hexagonal coffin with copper nails indicated that 'JR' was a gentleman. Lesser men were buried in makeshift coffins, or with none at all. The corpse also had a shroud pinned about it.
Kelso gives much of the credit for clarifying the JR102C case to the Smithsonian forensic anthropologists. They took the decaying remains to their facility where they concluded that 'JR' was a 5'9' male between 18 and 20 years old. The stage of the wisdom teeth development indicated the age.
Furthermore, he had bad teeth and was suffering from a tooth abscess at the time of death -- conditions quite common to the early settlers. The Smithsonian forensic team used C3 and C4 isotopes to measure nutrition habits and concluded that 'JR' was a corn diet man who probably hailed from Wales with perhaps a stint in central Italy.
The oxygen isotopes upon 'JR's' teeth were consistent with someone who spent time in Wales with interludes in Italy. This gave rise to speculation that 'JR' was the son of goldsmith John Martin. Martin had trade relations with Venice gold merchants. But why would anyone murder him in Jamestown, or was it a fatal accident? Why was the account of this event never sent back to the Colony's investors in England?
For all the answers to a story that is much more real and intriguing than 'Who shot J.R. Ewing,' get a copy of William M. Kelso's The Buried Truth, UVa Press, 2006.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. See more columns online at www.moultrienews.com. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com.)