Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 13, 1993 TAG: 9301130184
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: BALTIMORE LENGTH: Medium
OLD COFFINS LACK OLD AIR FOR TESTING
There was no 300-year-old air trapped inside St. Mary's City's lead coffins after all."I think it's modern air," said Joel Levine, the atmospheric scientist who led the air analysis by scientists at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
The coffins, buried beneath the 17th century Great Brick Chapel, contained the remains of two adults and a baby thought to have been members of Maryland's founding Calvert family. Scientists had hoped to find pristine, Colonial-era air trapped inside.
"We have done extensive analyses in the laboratory of the samples we took, and at this point we have unambiguously detected chlorofluorocarbons," Levine said Monday.
Chlorofluorocarbons are modern, man-made compounds. Because they have dispersed throughout the environment since they were first manufactured in the 1940s, they were chosen by the NASA researchers as the chemical "red flag" that would signal the presence of modern air inside the coffins.
The search for a sample of pre-industrial air was a major part of the lead coffins project when digging began Oct. 1.
Scientists had hoped to compare the chemistry of "old" air from the coffins with that of modern air in order to measure how much the atmosphere has been altered by industrial pollution and the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.
"That's the way it goes," said Henry Miller, chief archaeologist at Historic St. Mary's City. In any event, "we got a good [air sampling] system and it worked, and we can use it elsewhere, perhaps in England. We had to try."
Other studies resulting from the lead-coffins project continue in laboratories from Boston to Williamsburg, Va., he said. Scientists in the project will gather to discuss preliminary results this year, perhaps in May or June.
Scientists' hopes of finding preserved pre-industrial air in the coffins always were rated as slim. They rose sharply Oct. 23, however, when the largest of the three coffins held a partial vacuum and appeared to be sealed as several liters of air were extracted from its interior.
In the meantime, Miller said, study of the three coffins and their contents continues.
The human bones have been sent for study at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Hair, blood and tissue fragments were sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, where scientists have begun the search for genetic evidence - DNA - that might reveal any family relationships among the individuals whose remains were found in the coffins.