WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) — Archaeologists in Virginia were excavating the grounds of a building that stored gunpowder during the American Revolution when they uncovered the eye sockets of a human skull.
The team carefully unearthed four skeletons, including one with a bullet in the spine, and three amputated legs. They quickly surmised the bones were actually from the Civil War, when a makeshift hospital operated nearby and treated gravely wounded Confederate soldiers.
The archaeologists work at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, a museum that owns the land and focuses on the city’s 18th century history. They’re now trying to identify human remains from the 19th century, a rare endeavor that will include searching for living descendants and requesting swabs of DNA.
The museum has recovered enough genetic material from the men’s teeth for possible matches. But the prospect of identifying them emerged only after the team located handwritten lists in an archive that name the soldiers in that hospital.
“It is the key,” said Jack Gary, Colonial Williamsburg’s executive director of archaeology. “If these men were found in a mass grave on a battlefield, and there was no other information, we probably wouldn’t be trying to do this.”
The archaeologists have narrowed the possible identities to four men who served in regiments from Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and Virginia. The museum is withholding the names as the work continues.
Meanwhile, the remains were reinterred Tuesday at a Williamsburg cemetery where Confederate soldiers from the same battle are buried.
“Everyone deserves dignity in death,” Gary said. “And being stored in a drawer inside a laboratory does not do that.”
The soldiers fought in the Battle of Williamsburg, a bloody engagement on May 5, 1862. The fighting was part of the Peninsula Campaign, a major Union offensive that tried to end the war quickly.
The campaign’s failure that summer, stalling outside the Confederate capital of Richmond, informed President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to end slavery.
In his first inaugural address, Lincoln said he intended to reunite the nation with slavery intact in the Southern states, while halting its westward expansion, said Timothy Orr, a military historian and professor at Old Dominion University.
But Lincoln realized after the campaign that he needed a more radical approach, Orr said. And while the president faced political pressure for emancipation, freeing people who were enslaved served as “another weapon to defeat the Confederacy.”
“He becomes convinced that slavery is feeding the Confederate war effort,” Orr said. “It had to be taken away.”
Bigger and bloodier battles followed Williamsburg, Orr said, but it was “shockingly costly for both sides."
Roughly 14,600 Union soldiers fought about 12,500 Confederates, Carol Kettenburg Dubbs wrote in her 2002 book, “Defend This Old Town.” The number of Union killed, wounded, captured or missing was 2,283. The Confederate figure was 1,870.
The fighting moved north, while a Union brigade occupied the southern city. Confederate soldiers too wounded for travel were placed in homes and a church, which was converted into a hospital.
A surgeon from New York treated them, while local women visited the church, Dubbs wrote. One woman noted in her diary on May 26 that there were “only 18 out of 61 left.”
When the remains were discovered in 2023, they were aligned east-west in the Christian tradition, said Gary, the archaeologist. Their arms were crossed.
The careful burial indicates they were not dumped into a mass grave, Gary said. Those who died in the battle were almost immediately placed in trenches and later reinterred at a cemetery.
The men were not in uniform, said Eric Schweickart, a staff archaeologist. Some were in more comfortable clothes, based on artifacts that included buttons and a trouser buckle.
One soldier had two $5 gold coins from 1852. Another had a toothbrush made of animal bone and a snuff bottle, used for sniffing tobacco.
The bullet in the soldier’s spine was a Minié ball, a common round of Civil War ammunition. The foot of one amputated leg also contained a Minié ball. Bones in a second severed leg were shattered.
As the team researched the battle, they learned of the lists of hospitalized soldiers, said Evan Bell, an archaeological lab technician.
The lists were likely copied from Union records by the women who visited the wounded. The documents were with a local family’s papers at William & Mary, a university nearby.
The lists became the project’s Rosetta stone, providing names and regiments of more than 60 soldiers. They included dates of death and notes indicating amputations.
The archaeologists eliminated soldiers on the lists who survived or lost an extremity. The four skeletons had all of their limbs. Death dates were key because three men were buried together, allowing the team to pinpoint three soldiers who died around the same time.
William & Mary’s Institute for Historical Biology examined the remains and estimated their ages. The youngest was between 15 and 19, the oldest between 35 and 55. The estimates helped match names to enlistment records, census data and Union prisoner of war documents.
The soldiers’ remains and the amputated limbs were buried in their own stainless steel boxes in a concrete vault, Gary said. If descendants are confirmed, they can move their ancestor to another burial site.
The identification effort will continue for another several months at least and will include extensive genealogy work, Gary said. Using only DNA tests on remains from the 1800s can risk false positives because “you start becoming related to everyone.”
“We want it to be ironclad,” he said.
Jack Gary holds a Union soldier's belt buckle from the collections in Williamsburg, Va., on May 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
From left, Eric Schweickart, Jack Gary and Evan Bell chat in the Colonial Williamsburg archaeology lab in Williamsburg, Va., on Thursday, May 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
Archaeologist Jack Gary holds up a photo of a church that once stood beside the gunpowder magazine at Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Va., on Thursday, My 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
U.S. forces have boarded another oil tanker in the Caribbean Sea. The announcement was made Friday by the U.S. military. The Trump administration has been targeting sanctioned tankers traveling to and from Venezuela.
The pre-dawn action was carried out by U.S. Marines and Navy, taking part in the monthslong buildup of forces in the Caribbean, according to U.S. Southern Command, which declared “there is no safe haven for criminals” as it announced the seizure of the vessel called the Olina.
Navy officials couldn’t immediately provide details about whether the Coast Guard was part of the force that took control of the vessel as has been the case in the previous seizures. A spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard said there was no immediate comment on the seizure.
The Olina is the fifth tanker that has been seized by U.S. forces as part of a broader effort by Trump’s administration to control the distribution of Venezuela’s oil products globally following the U.S. ouster of President Nicolás Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid.
The latest:
Richard Grenell, president of the Kennedy Center, says a documentary film about first lady Melania Trump will make its premiere later this month, posting a trailer on X.
As the Trumps prepared to return to the White House last year, Amazon Prime Video announced a year ago that it had obtained exclusive licensing rights for a streaming and theatrical release directed by Brett Ratner.
Melania Trump also released a self-titled memoir in late 2024.
Some artists have canceled scheduled Kennedy Center performances after a newly installed board voted to add President Donald Trump’s to the facility, prompting Grenell to accuse the performers of making their decisions because of politics.
Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum says that she has asked her foreign affairs secretary to reach out directly to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Trump regarding comments by the American leader that the U.S. cold begin ground attacks against drug cartels.
In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News aired Thursday night, Trump said, “We’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water and we are going to start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico. It’s very sad to watch.”
As she has on previous occasions, Sheinbaum downplayed the remarks, saying “it is part of his way of communicating.” She said she asked her Foreign Affairs Secretary Juan Ramón de la Fuente to strengthen coordination with the U.S.
Sheinbaum has repeatedly rebuffed Trump’s offer to send U.S. troops after Mexican drug cartels. She emphasizes that there will be no violation of Mexico’s sovereignty, but the two governments will continue to collaborate closely.
Analysts do not see a U.S. incursion in Mexico as a real possibility, in part because Sheinbaum’s administration has been doing nearly everything Trump has asked and Mexico is a critical trade partner.
Trump says he wants to secure $100 billion to remake Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, a lofty goal going into a 2:30 meeting on Friday with executives from leading oil companies. His plan rides on oil producers being comfortable in making commitments in a country plagued by instability, inflation and uncertainty.
The president has said that the U.S. will control distribution worldwide of Venezuela’s oil and will share some of the proceeds with the country’s population from accounts that it controls.
“At least 100 Billion Dollars will be invested by BIG OIL, all of whom I will be meeting with today at The White House,” Trump said Friday in a pre-dawn social media post.
Trump is banking on the idea that he can tap more of Venezuela’s petroleum reserves to keep oil prices and gasoline costs low.
At a time when many Americans are concerned about affordability, the incursion in Venezuela melds Trump’s assertive use of presidential powers with an optical spectacle meant to convince Americans that he can bring down energy prices.
Trump is expected to meet with oil executives at the White House on Friday.
He hopes to secure $100 billion in investments to revive Venezuela’s oil industry. The goal rides on the executives’ comfort with investing in a country facing instability and inflation.
Since a U.S. military raid captured former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro on Saturday, Trump has said there’s a new opportunity to use the country’s oil to keep gasoline prices low.
The full list of executives invited to the meeting has not been disclosed, but Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips are expected to attend.
Attorneys general in five Democratic-led states have filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s administration after it said it would freeze money for several public benefit programs.
The Trump administration has cited concerns about fraud in the programs designed to help low-income families and their children. California, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New York states filed the lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The lawsuit asks the courts to order the administration to release the funds. The attorneys general have called the funding freeze an unconstitutional abuse of power.
Iran’s judiciary chief has vowed decisive punishment for protesters, signaling a coming crackdown against demonstrations.
Iranian state television reported the comments from Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei on Friday. They came after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei criticized Trump’s support for the protesters, calling Trump’s hands “stained with the blood of Iranians.”
The government has shut down the internet and is blocking international calls. State media has labeled the demonstrators as “terrorists.”
The protests began over Iran’s struggling economy and have become a significant challenge to the government. Violence has killed at least 50 people, and more than 2,270 have been detained.
Trump questions why a president’s party often loses in midterm elections and suggests voters “want, maybe a check or something”
Trump suggested voters want to check a president’s power and that’s why they often deliver wins for an opposing party in midterm elections, which he’s facing this year.
“There’s something down, deep psychologically with the voters that they want, maybe a check or something. I don’t know what it is, exactly,” he said.
He said that one would expect that after winning an election and having “a great, successful presidency, it would be an automatic win, but it’s never been a win.”
Hiring likely remained subdued last month as many companies have sought to avoid expanding their workforces, though the job gains may be enough to bring down the unemployment rate.
December’s jobs report, to be released Friday, is likely to show that employers added a modest 55,000 jobs, economists forecast. That figure would be below November’s 64,000 but an improvement after the economy lost jobs in October. The unemployment rate is expected to slip to 4.5%, according to data provider FactSet, from a four-year high of 4.6% in November.
The figures will be closely watched on Wall Street and in Washington because they will be the first clean readings on the labor market in three months. The government didn’t issue a report in October because of the six-week government shutdown, and November’s data was distorted by the closure, which lasted until Nov. 12.
FILE - President Donald Trump dances as he walks off stage after speaking to House Republican lawmakers during their annual policy retreat, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
