Little is known of the earliest English settlements in America. But archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume, exploring an 18th-century tobacco plantation in Virginia, accidentally discovered a site that seemed to date from a century earlier. Was this the short-lived settlement of Wolstenholme? Were the mutilated skeletons victims of the great Indian attack of 1622? This film is a record of Hume's search for a century and reveals how he pieces together his archaeological evidence to produce an astonishingly vivid picture of the way the first English colonists lived, with all the trappings of European civilisation transplanted into a hostile environment.