Fort Edward, N.Y. ? An archaeological team on Wednesday exhumed skeletal remains from the grave of an 18th-century woman whose death during the Revolutionary War turned her into an early American icon.

Excavation work at Jane McCrea’s purported grave site in this Hudson River town 45 miles north of Albany began before dawn in a snow-covered cemetery where two workers used a chain hoist to remove the half-ton marble tombstone.

The 5-foot-tall marker says McCrea was 17 when she was killed by Indians in 1777, but nearly everything about her — including her age, appearance and cause of death — are open to historical debate. There’s also speculation that she may be buried elsewhere, or that her remains were mingled with others interred when the cemetery was built in 1852.

The first break in the mystery came several hours into Wednesday’s digging, when one of the volunteer members of the archaeological crew uncovered the top of a skull buried about 5 feet below the surface.

“That’s a bone,” said Matthew Rozell, a high school teacher working on the project under the direction of David Starbuck, an assistant professor of anthropology at New Hampshire’s Plymouth State College.

Small pieces of bone, coffin nails and shredded wood were also uncovered as the afternoon wore on. Starbuck said he and his crew faced several more hours of meticulously scraping away the layers of sandy soil to see what lies beneath. It was too soon to determine just whose skull they had unearthed, he said.

“The worst thing is jumping to a quick judgment,” Starbuck said before adding that he found the discovery “encouraging.”

Starbuck received permission last year from a 98-year-old descendant of McCrea to exhume her remains in an attempt to answer some of the mystery surrounding her death.

“It’s great to be able to make her more real to people. Right now she’s an abstract,” said Dr. Lowell Levine, a dental forensic expert at the state police lab.

Levine is leading an all-star forensics team that’s taking part in the project. The others include his wife, Cathryn Levine, a hair and fiber expert who helped identify the remains of the Romanov family, and Dr. Anthony Falsetti, director of the Human Identification Laboratory of the University of Florida, who worked at ground zero at the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombing.

The forensics team will take samples from the skull and other bones in an effort to use DNA technology to try and confirm that McCrea is in fact buried in the Fort Edward grave. A study of the remains could also reveal her age, height and how she died, while photographs of her skull could be used to create a computerized reconstruction of her face, Levine said.

“It looks like something we can work with,” Falsetti said after viewing the skull emerging at the bottom of the grave.

However, as the day wore on, they found the grave contained the commingled remains of two women. Starbuck believes they were McCrea and Sarah McNeil, an older woman with whom McCrea had once lived. There was also only one skull, the older woman’s.

Laboratory testing will help determine identities, but some questions may never be answered, Starbuck said. “The cause of death? Probably not.”

According to most historical accounts, McCrea was killed here by British-allied Indians in the summer of 1777, just weeks before the Americans faced the redcoats in one of history’s most significant battles.

At 98, Mary McCrea Deeter of Wichita, Kan., is believed to be the oldest living McCrea descendant. Long interested in the story of her famous ancestor, she agreed to the grave site exhumation when approached by Starbuck last year.

Her grandson traveled from Washington state to witness the dig. Ben Williams, of Richland, Wash., said his grandmother made sure family members knew McCrea’s place in American history.

“I grew up thinking everyone knew who Jane McCrea was,” he said.

As a somber Williams stared into the open grave of his ancestor, the archaeologists and forensic experts busied themselves with the work of unraveling a mystery.

“I’m trying to walk a fine line between being the emotional family member and developing the professional detachment these people have to display to do what they do,” he said.