Digging Deeper into Tsenacommacah: A Temporal and Spatial Analysis of the Pre-Contact Archaeological Record at Virginia’s Flowerdew Hundred Plantation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Decades of archaeological work at Flowerdew Hundred, a tobacco plantation located in the Chesapeake region of Virginia, have focused primarily on its 17th-century occupation by English elites, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans. This research perspective has obfuscated the presence and impact of the Weanock (a Late Woodland people situated in the political territory of Tsenacommacah) and other pre-contact Native groups whose activities on the landscape are equally well-documented in the material record. Archaeological investigations exposed numerous pre-contact features and over 20,000 artifacts attesting to a substantial Native presence on the site over the millennia preceding European colonization. This poster characterizes Flowerdew’s 10,000 years of indigenous habitation by enlisting artifact and contextual data from three sites cataloged comprehensively into the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (www.daacs.org). We explore the spatial and temporal variation in over 16,200 lithic and 8,700 ceramic artifacts excavated from subsurface features and stratigraphic deposits distributed across the area of study. In doing so, we present a framework for understanding pre-contact activity areas and settlement patterns at Flowerdew Hundred and offer an essential baseline for further research into the complex social dynamics that continued to play out between Native peoples and the site’s occupants after 1619.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40065.0