NEW YORK — Ivor Nöel Hume, an accidental, self-taught English-born archeologist who unearthed the earliest extensive traces of British Colonial America, a town that had vanished after a massacre almost 350 years earlier, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Williamsburg, Va. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Kristen Welch.

In 1970, as the director of archeology at Colonial Williamsburg, Mr. Nöel Hume was searching in the ruins of Carter’s Grove, a nearby 17th-century plantation along the James River, when he and his colleagues discovered the remains of a once-fortified settlement called Wolstenholme Towne.

The site was founded in 1619 by 220 men and women who had arrived on the vessel Gift of God to establish a plantation for the Virginia Company of London. The settlement, named for John Wolstenholme, a prominent company shareholder, was about 9 miles downstream from Jamestown, where colonists had first landed 12 years before.

More settlers arrived in the succeeding months, but within three years, Wolstenholme had all but disappeared. In 1622, Indians, who had controlled the Tidewater area before the colonists arrived, attacked settlers in their homes and fields, leaving as many as 400 English dead. Afterward, most of the remaining outlying colonists in the area retreated to the safety of Jamestown.

Mr. Nöel Hume not only verified the massacre by exhuming the bones of its victims, he also found physical evidence of colonization that had largely eluded archeologists at Jamestown, where the swampy ground had swallowed perishable artifacts and where sophisticated excavations did not begin until a generation later.

Henry M. Miller, a historical researcher, wrote in The Public Historian in 2011, “This plantation complex, largely destroyed in the 1622 Algonquin Indian uprising, yielded valuable insights about the first decades of English settlement in America and provided key evidence later used to help interpret Jamestown.’’

As the head of archeology at Williamsburg and an author of ultimately more than two dozen books, Mr. Nöel Hume endowed the unvarnished artifacts he unearthed with a social and economic perspective.

The newspaper Antiques and the Arts Weekly recently credited his books, lectures, and television presentations with propelling the field of historical archeology “to the forefront of his profession.’’

Reviewing his book “The Virginia Adventure,’’ the historian Arthur Quinn wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1994 that Mr. Nöel Hume “will charm the mute artifacts into speaking about subjects on which the written record has preferred to remain silent.’’

“He is now unquestionably the foremost Colonial archeologist of his generation,’’ Quinn concluded.

Mr. Nöel Hume, who had been fascinated by artifacts since he received a gift of ancient Greek coins as a child but who did not have a degree in archeology, proudly considered himself to be a historical detective.

“Historical archeology,’’ he wrote, “simply means hunting for physical evidence and reviewing it alongside the testimony of people who knew or saw what happened.’’

As director of Colonial Williamsburg’s archeological mission from 1957 to 1988, he had to reconcile competing agendas.

The architects who oversaw the early excavations were mainly interested in unearthing the Colonial capital’s original brick foundations so that they could faithfully recreate its buildings. Most of the artifacts they dug up were neither recorded nor preserved.

“The archeology being done at Colonial Williamsburg was atrocious,’’ Mr. Nöel Hume said in a 2012 video interview with Cinebar Productions, which produces documentaries for museums and nonprofit organizations.

He also confronted another professional quandary: whether to exhibit the objects he uncovered as they were, or to gussy them up for popular consumption at Williamsburg, which had become a tourist attraction. He initially came down on the side of raw authenticity.

“History became more important than beauty,’’ he recalled. “Reality became the thing. I was one of the people who pushed for that.

“Looking back, I wish I hadn’t,’’ he continued. “It wasn’t that I was wrong. My own feeling was that Colonial Williamsburg was a place to come, and, as one person said, it was a place to recharge their patriotic batteries, and that’s what it was.’’

Ivor Nöel Hume (known as Nöel) was born on Nov. 4, 1927, in London to Cecil Nöel Hume, who represented an American bank in Europe, and the former Gladys Mary Bagshaw Mann. He was raised largely by servants in an aristocratic household.

He was evacuated from London during World War II and studied at Framlingham and St. Lawrence Colleges. He served briefly in the Army until he was injured in an accident. Hoping to become a playwright, he was hired as a stage manager in London.

After hearing a radio report about a man who fished antiquities from the Thames, he followed suit — but what he found was mostly counterfeit coins, which he cashed in for meal money.

He delivered his other finds to Adrian Oswald, the head of the Guildhall Museum, and began working with him, doing postwar archeology in the rubble of London. Oswald offered Mr. Nöel Hume a job at the museum in 1949; a week later, he found himself in charge after his boss contracted pneumonia and never returned to work.

“I came into archeology through the back door,’’ he once said.

He decided to specialize in 17th- and 18th-century wine bottles — mainly because no one else had — and when Colonial Williamsburg came calling for an expert, he was hired.

“I had never heard of Williamsburg,’’ he recalled. “I thought American history began at Plymouth.’’

He would spend the rest of his life in the area, excavating other sites and discovering what he hailed as “the birthplace of American science’’: remnants of Thomas Harriot’s laboratory on Roanoke Island, N.C., set up by metallurgists in the late 16th century to test mineral samples for gold.

Mr. Nöel Hume’s first wife, the former Audrey Baines, a fellow archeologist with whom he worked, died in 1993. In addition to his daughter Kristen, he leaves his second wife, the former Carol Grazier, and their sons, Michael and David Grazier; their daughter, Andrea Zecca; nine grandchildren; and a brother, David.