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Virginia mound archaeology has a well-known starting point: Thomas Jefferson’s late-eighteenth-century excavation of a burial mound near his home at Monticello ( Jefferson 1954). Unlike many who came after him, Jefferson recognized the connection of contemporary Native Americans to the mound he excavated. In Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the late eighteenth century, he describes an event he apparently viewed years earlier: [O]n whatever occasion they [the burial mounds] may have been made, they are of considerable notoriety among the Indians: for a party passing, about thirty years ago, through the part of the country where this barrow is, went through the woods directly to it, without any instructions or inquiry, and having staid about it some time, with expressions of sorrow, they returned to the high road, which they had left about half a dozen miles to pay this visit, and pursued their journey. ( Jefferson 1954:100) Jefferson believed that the mounds were constructed and used by the immediate ancestors of the Indians living in eighteenth-century Virginia, although Hantman’s examination of Jefferson’s writing and its historical context strongly suggests that Jefferson did not view his work as addressing the mound builder myth (Hantman 1998; Hantman and Dunham 1993). Scholarly concern with the mound builders was still nearly a century away, and most of the Virginia archaeologists who succeeded Jefferson were even less clear about the link between Virginia’s contemporary Native Americans and the burial mounds that dotted the landscape of central Virginia. More recent research has been hindered by the lack of ethnohistoric descriptions of interior Virginia. The Jamestown colonists barely From Jefferson to Jamestown Monacan History through English Eyes 1 ventured to Virginia’s interior, and their written descriptions of the people who lived there are very limited (Hantman 1990). Archaeological evidence , at least until recently, has also been hard to come by. The sites occupied and used in the centuries before Jamestown are dispersed along®oodplains, deeply buried by alluvial deposits or long since disturbed by plowing and ®ooding. The focus of this chapter is the lifeways of the Monacans, native people living in interior Virginia at the time of Jamestown and in prior centuries and provides the context necessary to interpret the bioarchaeological data with which the rest of this study is concerned. This context comes from two directions. The ¤rst is a synopsis of the ethnohistoric and archaeological accounts of the native people of Virginia’s coast—the Powhatans— along with consideration of similarities and differences to the Monacan area and a description of what little is known about Powhatan-Monacan interactions. The second is a discussion of the archaeology of interior Virginia from approximately a.d. 1000 to the seventeenth century. (See Figure 1.1.) Powhatan Ethnohistory and Archaeology European presence in the mid-Atlantic region was relatively late compared to other areas of the New World. There was ample opportunity for the impact of European trade goods and disease microbes to affect the midFigure 1.1 Map of Virginia in the early seventeenth century, providing only a rough approximation of Powhatan and Monacan territories. In fact these areas shifted, expanded, and contracted over time. This ¤gure does not illustrate the location of the Mannahoacs, identi¤ed by Smith as living to the north of the Monacans. Monacan History through English Eyes | 7 Atlantic well before European observers were interacting with, observing, and commenting on the native peoples of this region. Thus, despite an ethnohistoric record of the native peoples of seventeenth-century coastal Virginia that is in many ways astoundingly detailed, much of our understanding of the protohistoric period of the late ¤fteenth and early sixteenth centuries must come from archaeology, along with judicious interpretation of historic records. English and French ¤shing crews and fur traders had been an active presence in what became northeastern North America since the late ¤fteenth century. There has been speculation, but as yet no solid evidence, that ¤fteenth-century explorers such as Vespucci and Cabot located the Chesapeake Bay (Lewis and Loomie 1953). Hernando de Soto’s ¤rst expedition into the interior of the Southeast took place in 1540, and the St. Augustine Mission in Florida was established in 1565, but neither of these events involved direct contact between Native Virginians and Europeans . Although there may have been an English ship in the Chesapeake Bay as early as 1546, there was no further European presence in the area until a Spanish ship made a brief stop...

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