Indigenous Landscapes of the Middle Chesapeake

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Brad Hatch.

Trade played a crucial role in the relationships that formed between European colonists and Native Americans during the early colonial period. In the 17th-century Potomac River Valley the interactions between Natives and Europeans laid the foundations for the emergence of a truly creolized society. This paper examines the influence of Native Americans on the early settlement of Virginia's Potomac Valley from 1647-1666 using the Hallowes site (44WM6) as an example. Analyses of the faunal remains,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex J. Flick.

This paper examines the assemblages of three sequentially occupied sites related to the displacement and northward migration of the Piscataway from their southern Maryland homeland between 1680 and 1743. These collections provide evidence for the group’s adjustments to new physical and social terrains encountered in dislocation. Although historical records document Piscataway efforts to distance themselves from the encroachment and harassment of English colonists by vacating their ancestral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia King. Rebecca Webster.

This paper explores how indigenous groups in the lower Potomac River valley used beads of shell, glass, copper, stone, and clay to both respond to and shape an ever-changing colonial landscape. The distributions of beads recovered from five sites occupied between 1500 and 1710 reveal variations and trends linked to site function, status, ethnicity, displacement, and dislocation. In particular, the distribution of bead color, an important attribute for communicating Native states of being,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Sickler.

One of the rarest metals in the Americas, copper has long been traded across the North American continent by indigenous cultures who viewed the raw material as holding immense spiritual and social significance.  Native American societies from the Great Lakes to the Chesapeake Bay have fashioned copper into various objects that were often used by elites to uphold social distinction and maintain political order. Archaeologists studying indigenous groups have observed that the consumption of copper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Kate Mansius.

Historical archaeologists often point to the arrival of Europeans in the 17th century as a catalyst for change in aspects of indigenous lifeways.  This is especially true concerning lithic technology, when the metanarrative often describes Native Americans quickly swapping their stone tools for the "superior" metal tools of Europeans.  Recent studies, such as Carly Harmon’s paper, Analyzing Native American Lithic Material Culture from 1600 to 1700 (2012), have challenged such thinking;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott M Strickland.

Archaeologists and historians have long used Captain John Smith’s 1612 map of the Chesapeake to interpret the native landscape at contact. From this map and the narrative of his 1608 voyages, inferences have been made about territories, population size, and settlement locations. Recent research mapping Indigenous Cultural Landscapes (ICLs) for the National Park Service has begun to re-envision the study of Smith’s map and highlight the limitations of its efficacy in drawing broad conclusions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josue Nieves.

Contemporary understandings of 17th century Algonquian Rappahannock history are inextricably linked to regional historical narratives emphasizing chiefdom development and Anglo-Native Virginian colonial encounters. The Powhatan Chiefdom, one of the most influential  political organizations within the broader Coastal Plain, often serves as the primary research focus for  investigations of these topics due to its perceived role as the dominant force defining regional social organization strategies...