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<p><strong>By Mike McCombs</strong></p>
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<p><strong>The Island News&nbsp;</strong></p>
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<p>A free public symposium was held Saturday at the USCB Center for the Arts Auditorium to discuss the Search for Stuarts Town, the project to look for evidence of the lost Scottish colony in Beaufort’s Old Point neighborhood.</p>
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<p>So what’s the verdict?</p>
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<p>“More work is needed,” Chester B. DePratter, Ph.D., of the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, said.</p>
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<p>That being said, DePratter, and Charles Cobb, Ph.D., of the Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of Florida, both agreed they were “98 percent sure” they were looking in the right place.</p>
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<p>“We are now sure that Stuarts Town is beneath the City of Beaufort and not at Spanish Point.,” DePratter said.</p>
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<p>In August of 2022, a team of archaeologists from the University of South Carolina’s Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) and the University of Florida spent a week doing an exploratory dig in The Point neighborhood of Beaufort – searching for the lost 17<sup>th</sup> Century Scottish colony of Stuarts Town.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>All of the collected materials have been at the SCIAA laboratories in Columbia where, for these past few months, they have been meticulously cleaned, examined, and catalogued.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>Slides were shown of the pieces of pottery and such collected from the 118 samples taken from 17 private properties throughout The Point neighborhood.</p>
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<p>DePratter said they hoped to soon have an exhibit of their findings, as well a film documenting the work, in the near future at the Beaufort History Museum.</p>
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<p><em>Mike McCombs is the Editor of The Island News and can be reached at TheIslandNews@gmail.com.</em></p>
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