Jamestown, Va., has a history of building on its past.

The English arrived there nearly 400 years ago and began building things - a fort, a few mud huts and a church. The hapless colonists did not thrive at first, and many of them found early graves. So many died that they sometimes buried folks on top of other folks. They must not have marked the graves very well, or else the gravediggers were also buried, because no one at the time seemed to remember where any of the departed had been laid to rest.

A house or two were built above graves, houses were built over forgotten wells, forts on top of forts, churches over churches and statues scattered about willy-nilly atop everything else.

Archaeologists have been spending years sorting it all out.

Jamestown is getting ready to celebrate its 400th anniversary next year. Special activities are planned throughout the year, featuring a huge party the weekend of May 11-13. President Bush has been invited to that one, as has Queen Elizabeth II. Crowds will be gargantuan. Security will be tight.

I decided to visit “Historic Jamestowne” recently, to beat the rush.

There are two “Jamestowns” side by side, and it’s important to know which is which. “Historic Jamestowne” is the site of the original fort. Run by the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, it is a serious archaeological site.

Next-door is the modern re-creation of Jamestown, complete with a fort, houses, Indian village, full-size ship replicas and costumed presenters. This Jamestown calls itself “Jamestown Settlement.“

Up until a few years ago, most experts believed that the site of the original fort at Jamestown, a triangular palisade built of upright logs stuck in the ground, had been lost to erosion into the James River. Recent excavations, however, discovered that the old fort had actually been buried under Confederate earthworks.

Archaeologists dug out stains in the dirt showing where the original logs had once stood, took cement casts of the holes and erected a wall of new logs in precisely the same spot.

The old brick church beside the even older brick tower is not the original church. The current church was built in 1907 for the 300th anniversary, over the foundations of the brick church that went along with the tower. The “new” church was built a tiny bit larger and has glass plates embedded in the floor to allow visitors to see the brick foundations of the earlier church, which was built upon the site of another earlier church.

And it turns out, even the old tower, crumbling and ancient though it may seem, was built where the original palisade once stood.

Digging continues within the partially reconstructed palisade of the 1607 fort, and visitors can watch archaeologists patiently scraping away layers of dirt from features that continue to emerge.

A bumper crop of artifacts has been harvested from the fort. A new exhibit hall had to be built to show them off.

Keeping with tradition, it was built on top of something else.

The Archaearium - a new word, coined by the antiquities association - was built on pilings above the foundations of the Statehouse and the lost graveyard. The pilings were placed to avoid disturbing significant features or artifacts, and to offer some protection from the James River, just a pottery-shard’s-throw away.

The Archaearium is a lavish and creative display of many of the thousands of artifacts found at Jamestown, including weapons, medical instruments, ceramics, tools, coins and armor, some of which are integrated into scenes along the walls. Relics found in a well are arrayed in a mock-up of the well, in the approximate positions where they were found.

One corner in particular haunts my memory.

Three of the early Jamestown colonists, a woman and two young men, are summoned from the past in re-creations of their faces. Their sculpted heads, created by adding clay flesh to their reassembled skulls, stared past my shoulder as I drifted through their quiet corner.

A complete skeleton, thought to be that of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, is laid out in a glass case like a pair of empty overalls. Next to the case is a video screen showing a floating image of Gosnold’s skull. As the grinning skull rotates, a young man’s face with long hair and a trim goatee takes shape on the screen. His serene gaze scans the walls, me and his own skeleton stretched beside him.

In the next case is a molded cast from another recovered skeleton, only this one is not so serene. A lead musket ball is embedded in a shattered leg bone, and the skull is thrown back, its jaw dropping open as if frozen in a petrified scream of surprise and agony. The skull is turned to face the young man’s sculpted head on a pedestal. The face bears an empty expression, as though not quite grasping its situation.

The glass east wall of the Archaearium looks out over the fort site, inviting the imagination to float across the green, melding the relics so near at hand with the ghosts of the people who once carried them, drank from them, fought with them and perhaps died with them in their hands.

At last I left the spell of the Archaearium and emerged back into the sunlight of a warm afternoon in the fall of 2006.

A young mother was hurrying along the path, leading a dawdling little girl by the hand.

“Let’s go see what’s inside here,“ the young mother said. “Maybe there’ll be skeletons!“

There are indeed, I thought.

David Rolfe is a photographer at the Winston-Salem Journal in Winston-Salem, N.C.