When the first English colonists arrived at Jamestown in the Chesapeake region of what is now Virginia, they found the region populated by Native Americans living in scattered villages along the numerous rivers and inlets. The area was ruled by Powhatan, paramount chief of the Algonquians, and his name was also used for his home town and for the province. Beginning with Captain John Smith, the English told the story of the Natives from the English’s perspective. Smith made a detailed map of the region showing dozens of native settlements that provides much information about the area in the early 1600s.
In The Powhatan Landscape, Martin Gallivan, an archaeologist at the College of William and Mary, expands that story to include the origins and development of the Virginia Algonquians from about A.D. 200 to 1700. Much of the material for this study comes from Gallivan’s research at Werowocomoco, the Chickahominy River, and Kiskiak. Werowocomoco, on the York River, was Powhatan’s capital and the site of John Smith’s rescue by Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas. Gallivan’s extensive excavations of the site have pushed its history back 2,000 years.
Using archaeology, and with the help of modern Native Americans, Gallivan deftly shifts the focus of Virginia’s Algonquian past from the English accounts of the colonial era to a narrative describing the construction of places and communities, activity areas, and natural regions. These were a riverine people who relied on fishing grounds, and later on horticulture. Ceremonial spaces including earthwork enclosures were used for centuries to pull people together. This is archaeology that sees the past through the physical places utilized by people over time.
The Powhatan Landscape is an important addition to the growing field of landscape archaeology, providing new perspectives on a people who have been previously understood only through the eyes of colonial interlopers. Their history goes back at least 1,400 years before the arrival of the English, and Gallivan has laid a framework for unraveling and understanding it.
