Return to Martin’s Hundred: The Archaeology of a Mid-Seventeenth Century Virginia Houselot

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Research of the 17th Century Chesapeake" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In March of 1622, nearly a third of Virginia’s English population was killed in a surprise attack by the local Powhatan with the goal of hampering the English expansion efforts, and to reassert their supremacy over the newcomers. Martin’s Hundred, a fortified settlement founded by the English four years earlier, and located 10 miles southeast of Jamestown, was the hardest hit, with 78 of its 122 inhabitants killed. The survivors fled to the relative safety of Jamestown, but would return to Martin’s Hundred a little over a year later where they established a loosely connected network of farms to the east of the destroyed village of Wolstenholme Town. This paper presents preliminary interpretations of excavated features and the spatial patterning of artifacts from recent investigations of CG11, a remote English houselot likely established as part of the Martins Hundred’s resettlement in the midst of the decade-long Second Anglo-Powhatan War.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Research of the 17th Century Chesapeake   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 864