A Land Unto Itself: Virginia's Northern Neck, Colonialism, And The Early Atlantic

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "A Land Unto Itself: Virginia's Northern Neck, Colonialism, And The Early Atlantic," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Virginia's Northern Neck, like many colonized regions in the early Atlantic world, was an important point of intersection between an emerging modern European world and, in this case, the Indigenous world of eastern North America. European, Indigenous, and African residents and immigrants, animals, plants, and goods moved within and beyond this relatively understudied region, connecting and forging a new global reality. At the same time, the Northern Neck's relatively isolated location and its comparatively late date of settlement forged an imagined and even real distinctiveness that is itself an important point of evidence that deserves interpretation. The papers in this session explore this region of persistent if displaced Indigenous communities, landscapes of ecological transformation, rebel ancestors of American icons, and the contested roots of racialized slavery.