Persistent Places in Colonial Tsenacomacoh

Chapter 7 addresses the enduring power of place in the Virginia Algonquian spatial imaginary. Resistance to colonists’ encroachment on traditional lands, burial grounds, and sacred spaces took the form of coordinated revolts in 1622 and 1644. These Powhatan uprisings resulted in English retaliation and further Native loss of life and land. And yet, archaeological evidence from this period indicates that Virginia Algonquians made pilgrimages to persistent places to bury ancestors, sacrifice animals, and inter objects, even after the residential population had departed. The continuation of such practices in colonial Tsenacomacoh contradicts a narrative of abandonment, acculturation, and disappearance.

The Coarse-Pounded Corn People

Chapter 5 focuses on archaeological investigations along the Chickahominy River and a history of residential settlements, subsistence practices, and burial grounds during the Middle to Late Woodland transition. In the sixth century A.D., Native communities living along the Chickahominy River began to bury the deceased in communal burial grounds (ossuaries) located in the drainage’s swampy interior. During the Late Woodland period, new places were established along the Chickahominy with the construction of dispersed farmsteads, burial grounds, and a palisaded compound. In this history of placemaking we see evidence of the spatial practices whereby forager-fishers became the Chickahominy. As is apparent from colonial accounts of the Chickahominy, the “coarse-pounded corn people,” a horticultural economy was a part of this ethnogenetic process. Bioarchaeological study of skeletal remains from the Chickahominy, including stable isotope analysis, provides a basis for considering the history of maize-based horticulture in the region.

Epilogue

The epilogue closes the volume by considering ways that contemporary Native communities in the region have assumed an activist role and begun to reclaim a greater part in representations of their pasts. Virginia and Maryland tribes have achieved state recognition, partnered with federal and state agencies, reburied ancestors, created indigenous archaeology programs, and prevented the destruction of traditional cultural properties by residential development and dam construction. For today’s Native communities in the Chesapeake, the deep history of Tsenacomacoh represents a powerful basis for reaffirming a place on the landscape.

The Place of the Antler Wearers

Chapter 6 addresses Werowocomoco’s archaeological and ethnohistorical records as well as the town’s role in the Virginia Algonquian spatial imaginary. Shortly after its establishment as a town circa A.D. 1200, Werowocomoco’s residents reconfigured the settlement’s spaces, constructing a residential area lining the river and an interior zone marked by a series of trenches. A biography of place and a close reading of colonial-era accounts suggest that Werowocomoco was reconfigured and redefined several times as a ritualized location. By the seventeenth century, Werowocomoco represented the center place of the Powhatan chiefdom and the scene of several consequential encounters with English colonists. The construction of monumental earthworks and chiefly architecture within Werowocomoco made reference to construction episodes dating centuries earlier, suggesting that Werowocomoco’s history of placemaking influenced Powhatan’s decision to move there during the sixteenth century. As a town that marked the transition from horticultural activities to hunting camps during the feasts and sacrifices of autumn, Werowocomoco also anchored the annual cycle.

Arrival in the Wide Land

Chapter 4 discusses how the Virginia Algonquian landscape first coalesced as a result of population movements and social interactions involving different communities of hunter gatherers during the early centuries A.D. As documented within the Kiskiak site, the archaeology of this period records the appearance of new settlement forms, subsistence practices, and a ceramic tradition shared across a broad swath of the coastal Middle Atlantic. Historical linguistic studies raise the possibility that these developments resulted from the rapid replacement of indigenous foragers by newly arrived Algonquian speakers migrating from the north. The archaeological record on the James-York peninsula, by contrast, documents the coexistence for several centuries of distinct communities of practice linked to different material traditions. The archaeology of interior encampments and of riverine settlements with shell middens points toward seasonal movement between places where forager-fishers gathered for events that involved feasting, exchange, and intermarriage. These spatial practices introduced during the second century A.D. signalled an emphasis on estuarine settings that has oriented Native history in the Chesapeake to the present day.

Mapping the Terrain

Chapter 2 considers the ways that Virginia Algonquian communities constructed places and made history, beginning with disparate and contradictory representations of the Chesapeake found in colonial-era maps. These include the Map of Virginia and the Zuñiga chart, both produced by English sources. Native mapping practices appear in Powhatan’s Mantle and in a divination ceremony performed by Pamunkey priests. These contrasting cartographic depictions of the Chesapeake colonial landscape highlight the distinct icons and tropes through which Natives and newcomers represented the Chesapeake region. While Virginia’s colonial historiography typically foregrounds early encounters understood from the perspective of English and Powhatan leaders, these maps illustrate how Tsenacomacoh’s past may be understood as a longer and deeper narrative keyed to geographic spaces, meaningful places, and a broadly inclusive notion of landscape.

Dwelling in Tsenacomacoh

Chapter 1 outlines an archaeological history of the Algonquian Chesapeake which examines the culturally specific ways that Virginia Algonquians dwelled within the estuary. The study is influenced by scholarly conversations about space, place, and landscape on the one hand and, on the other, by contemporary Native communities’ demands for research which challenges triumphalist colonial narratives hinging on Native defeat, fragmentation, and abandonment. Primary evidence comes from a reassessment of colonial-era documents and from three archaeological studies, the Werowocomoco Project, the Chickahominy River Survey, and excavations at the Powhatan town of Kiskiak. Previous research in the region, summarized in this chapter, sets the stage for a deep historical anthropology of landscape that crosses the historic / precolonial divide. Chapter 1 closes by summarizing the remainder of the book, organized around sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s model of space that includes three axes: spatial representations, spatial practices, and the spatial imaginary.

Placemaking in the Algonquian Chesapeake

Chapter 3 considers Virginia Algonquian place names, concluding that the Tsenacomacoh landscape was understood and labelled from the vantage of a canoe. Place names typically referenced navigation along and across rivers as well as favoured locations for fishing and for gathering wild, wetland plants. Such representations of space and of mobility hint that Tsenacomacoh was constructed on an estuarine landscape initially inhabited by forager-fishers. The rivers, streams, and embayed waters of the Chesapeake estuary provided the primary pathways connecting places in this setting. Algonquian place names framed travel through Tsenacomacoh’s waterscape, resulting in naming practices keyed to the dynamic interface between dry land and tidal water.

Prologue

The prologue draws a contrast between the typical starting point for Chesapeake history—John Smith’s captivity narrative—with an alternative point of departure—a Pamunkey ritual performed around a map of the Powhatan world. A shift from American master narratives and colonial-era celebrities toward local forms of knowledge and deeper histories of place raises several challenging questions: How did the landscapes of the Chesapeake—defined in the broadest terms to include natural settings as well as built environments, representations of spaces, and experiences of places—contribute to the making of Tsenacomacoh and the unmaking of the Powhatan chiefdom? What role did maize and horticultural towns, political centers, sacred locations, and valued objects play in this landscape? Do maps, settlement arrangements, and burial traditions point us toward Virginia Algonquian modes of dwelling and of making history? Might a deeper history of Tsenacomacoh’s spaces, places, and pathways bring to the fore silences in the way colonial histories are recounted today?.