A Landscape They Didn’t See: The Great Rappahannock Town at Mid-Century

Summary

This is an abstract from 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.

The Northern Neck of Virginia appears to have had an especially large Indigenous population at the moment of English occupation in 1607. That population grew through the 17th century as colonial authorities generally prevented settlers from moving into the region while Indigenous nations from elsewhere in the Virginia and Maryland colonies relocated to the region. As a result, the Norther Neck retained a vibrant, relational Indigenous landscape across territory, waterways, and skyscapes that was virtually unseen by those settler occupiers coming into the region by the 1640s and 1650s. This paper describes one of those landscapes – the Great Rappahannock Town – at mid-century as deeply emplaced within Indigenous systems of spatial knowledge.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Land Unto Itself: Virginia's Northern Neck, Colonialism, And The Early Atlantic   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow