Did the Lost Colony of Roanoke Disappear or Just Assimilate?

In 1587, an expedition of 118 men, women and children set out from England for the New World. Headed by artist and governor John White, these colonists reached Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina, on July 22. As the months wore on, the colonists faced mounting dangers from dwindling resources, tense relations with the Indigenous Algonquin and impending winter. White sailed back to England to gather more supplies, but didn’t return to North America until three years later.

When he set foot on Roanoke Island again on August 18, 1590, he found traces of the colony, but no inhabitants. There were just two clues left at the site of the original settlement: the word “CRO” carved into a tree, and the word “CROATOAN” carved into a palisade. With no indication of a struggle or hasty escape, it seemed unlikely that the colonists had been attacked or driven away. So they became known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

But a discovery in May 2025 added a new layer to this mystery. Archaeologists unearthed two piles of iron flakes on Hatteras Island, North Carolina—formerly known as Croatoan Island. Found under a thick layer of historic refuse, these iron flakes, also known as hammer scale, are the byproduct of blacksmithing, which could indicate that the colonists had been forging iron objects they’d needed. They could have, then, fled to Croatoan and assimilated with the local tribe.

“As a historian, I can say it backs up the most likely theory, which is that the lost colonists went to Hatteras Island and abandoned Roanoke,” says Kathleen DuVal, a history professor at the University of North Carolina. She adds that the Indigenous people of Croatoan wouldn’t necessarily have built a blacksmithing shop, so it’s quite possible the two piles of hammer scale were produced by the colonists. They arrived with limited resources, so one scenario is that they tried to blacksmith the metal products they already had into something else. “We don't know for sure who did it, but the narrative of it makes sense.”

Another part of this narrative is that John White and the colonists had made an agreement before White left for England, DuVal says. The colonists were to write where they were going if they left, and to put a mark over the inscription if they’d left in a hurry. Indeed, the carved “CROATOAN” seems to indicate the colonists had intended to head there, and the absence of a mark means there had been no hurry.

“John White himself was sure that they had gone to Croatoan,” DuVal says. Indeed, White had begun to sail to Croatoan after finding Roanoke empty, but he never completed the journey because of a storm.

As for the assimilation piece, “the lost colonists couldn't survive on their own,” she says. Roanoke Island didn’t have much farming, and the Indigenous tribes grew corn on the mainland. “So to feed themselves… they would have needed to either be fed by or move in with a native town,” DuVal says, “and the Croatoans are the most likely.”

But this finding isn’t universally compelling. “To me that seems a bit of a stretch, then, to go ahead and make the assumption that there's assimilation,” says Whitney Leeson, a history and anthropology professor at Roanoke College in Virginia. Leeson says she would have expected to see additional byproducts from a blacksmithing forge like charcoal and slag, which is a rock-like leftover material from smelting metal. She acknowledges that more evidence could arise with further research, and that the thick shell midden covering it geologically places the scale deep in the past. 

Another explanation could be that this material reached Hatteras Island through trade by passing ships, according to Charles Ewen, a professor emeritus of anthropology at East Carolina University and co-author of Becoming the Lost Colony: The History, Lore and Popular Culture of the Roanoke Mystery. “I don't see any evidence that you have Europeans actually living there,” he says. The new research has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, as Ewen notes. “I'm waiting for the goods,” he says.

As for more convincing evidence, DuVal says it would be great if the hammer scale could be dated. The layer of dirt containing the iron flakes was analyzed with radiocarbon dating, which suggests that its age lines up with that of the Lost Colony. And, after 50 years of archaeology research, Ewen says that he would like to see more clues of European life, such as remnants of their structures or a Christian cemetery.

This hammer scale is another small piece of a puzzle that’s persisted for hundreds of years. Perhaps it doesn’t hold all the answers, but it offers another potential clue.