The Coarse-Pounded Corn People

Chapter 5 focuses on archaeological investigations along the Chickahominy River and a history of residential settlements, subsistence practices, and burial grounds during the Middle to Late Woodland transition. In the sixth century A.D., Native communities living along the Chickahominy River began to bury the deceased in communal burial grounds (ossuaries) located in the drainage’s swampy interior. During the Late Woodland period, new places were established along the Chickahominy with the construction of dispersed farmsteads, burial grounds, and a palisaded compound. In this history of placemaking we see evidence of the spatial practices whereby forager-fishers became the Chickahominy. As is apparent from colonial accounts of the Chickahominy, the “coarse-pounded corn people,” a horticultural economy was a part of this ethnogenetic process. Bioarchaeological study of skeletal remains from the Chickahominy, including stable isotope analysis, provides a basis for considering the history of maize-based horticulture in the region.

Dwelling in Tsenacomacoh

Chapter 1 outlines an archaeological history of the Algonquian Chesapeake which examines the culturally specific ways that Virginia Algonquians dwelled within the estuary. The study is influenced by scholarly conversations about space, place, and landscape on the one hand and, on the other, by contemporary Native communities’ demands for research which challenges triumphalist colonial narratives hinging on Native defeat, fragmentation, and abandonment. Primary evidence comes from a reassessment of colonial-era documents and from three archaeological studies, the Werowocomoco Project, the Chickahominy River Survey, and excavations at the Powhatan town of Kiskiak. Previous research in the region, summarized in this chapter, sets the stage for a deep historical anthropology of landscape that crosses the historic / precolonial divide. Chapter 1 closes by summarizing the remainder of the book, organized around sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s model of space that includes three axes: spatial representations, spatial practices, and the spatial imaginary.