When the ship Susan Constant anchored at Old Point Comfort on April 28, 1607, the written history of Jamesland officially began. But the land’s Indigenous inhabitants, some of whom the settlers met that day at Kecoughtan, had already been here for some 18,000 years. These people had weathered major changes and shaped the landscape in myriad ways that were recorded in their oral histories. For at least a generation they had already been impacted by European contact, witnessing a 1570 Spanish mission on the Virginia Peninsula (Ajacán) that came to an abrupt, violent end, and then possibly absorbing refugees from the failed 1587 English colony to the south at Roanoke.
During that time the Algonquian leader Wahunsenacawh, from the village of Powhatan near the falls of the James, built an empire named after his hometown that ultimately stretched across what is now tidewater Virginia. The many tribes belonging to this confederacy may have had a total population of around 25,000. Their leaders were preoccupied with the meaning of the European arrival, and Wahunsenacawh’s priests foretold of a great nation arising from the Chesapeake to destroy his realm. Some forty years later this would come to pass, with the empire dissolved and its people decimated by muskets and smallpox.
These people had a complex society, including powerful shamans called kwiocosuk; elaborate rituals, such as the huskanaw rite of passage; sophisticated technologies for managing natural resources, including controlled burns and fish weirs; and a language and mythology developed over millennia. Although the colonists were able to document scraps of this culture, the vast majority has been lost.
The Indigenous societies of Jamesland above the Fall Line are far less well documented. Inhabiting much of the Piedmont were the Monacan, a Siouan-speaking people often at odds with the Powhatan, who made their capital at Rassawek at the mouth of the Rivanna. Other Siouan tribes or subgroups in the region included the Nahyssan, Tutelo, and Saponi. Many of these people were pushed off their ancestral lands and absorbed by other tribes during the 17th and 18th centuries, although a small Monacan population still persists in today’s Amherst County.
Least known of all are the pre-contact peoples of the Jamesland highlands. By the time Europeans began settling this region in the 1700s, it contained few if any Indigenous settlements and was used mostly by hunting, trading, and war parties from the distant strongholds of the Iroquois, Shawnee, and Cherokee. Their primary trailway, called Athawominee by the Shawnee, is still used by modern US Highway 11. Yet the land preserves evidence of a long history of occupation. Burial mounds, some containing hundreds of graves, had been built and maintained for centuries and were still regarded as sacred. Quarries have been found at which minerals like jasper were mined for thousands of years, and long pathways have been mapped over which these resources were traded. In the Shenandoah Valley just adjacent to Jamesland, a people known only as the Keyser culture left traces of their palisaded villages and crop fields. But by 1700, along with some ninety percent of our region’s other native inhabitants, they were gone.
The map below represents one possible reconstruction of the region’s peoples at the time of contact, along with some of their towns, trade routes, and sacred sites. (Click on the map to access the full-size version.) Many of their names have multiple spellings depending on the source (e.g. Tsenacommacah vs. Tsenacomoco). For some of the locations, such as Rassawek and Werowocomoco, archaeological evidence exists; for others, like the town of Orapax that became the second capital of the Powhatan confederacy, we have only the sketchy maps and descriptions of the colonists for reference. It’s important to bear in mind that European classifications of discrete tribes are often a poor reflection of the complex relationships between Indigenous groups and subgroups.
