Dig Casts New Light On Indian Culture

Va. Archaeological Findings Unveil Complex Society

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Dig Reveals Complex Society
Archeologists located the site of Chief Powhatan's village along the York river, casting a new light on the Algonquian culture.

When archaeologists began digging in a cornfield one steamy summer day on the banks of the York River, they were pretty sure they would find remnants of Werowo comoco, the legendary capital city chosen by Powhatan, the Algonquian paramount chief who once had the power to decide whether the settlers at Jamestown should live or starve.

But once the archaeologists began scraping test pits every 50 feet, what they began to unearth was unlike anything they had seen in the region. About 1,000 feet from the river, where they expected to find nothing at all, they found a line of darkly stained dirt where newer topsoil had filled in what at one time had been a long, straight ditch.

The ditch was so straight, so perfectly constructed, they figured it must have been the work of colonists who moved into the area with their more sophisticated metal tools and axes once the Indians had moved out. But the team found only native artifacts. Then radiocarbon testing showed that the ditch was built in the 13th century, 400 years before Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas's fateful encounter with John Smith.

The ditches, archaeologist Martin Gallivan theorizes, are monuments, separating the sacred part of the city, where Powhatan and his priests lived, from the profane, where everyone else went about the business of daily life. These long-hidden ditches -- Smith never mentioned them in his writings -- are as important to understanding the Algonquian culture as the elaborate structures of the Inca or the white stone tributes to Jefferson and Lincoln on the Mall.

"There's no place like Werowocomoco," Gallivan said. For the Algonquians, for centuries the dominant tribe of Virginia's Tidewater region, it was the ancient center of the universe.

The discoveries at this site have provided a counter to impressions created by colonists such as Smith, who described the natives as "idle," "ignorant of the knowledge of gold" and "carelesse of any thing but from hand to mouth."

"Historians tend to portray Virginia Indians as a static, unchanging culture," said David Brown, another archeologist with the Werowocomoco Research Group. "This really widens our perspective of how complex this society was and had been for a very long time."

This place, on the banks of Purtan Bay in Gloucester County, lives in American legend. It was here that a captured Smith was supposedly saved from certain death by a young and headstrong Pocahontas. It was called Werowocomoco -- the place of the chief.

On a recent hot summer day, Gallivan, a College of William and Mary assistant professor, surveyed the land much as Powhatan might have as teams of archaeology students -- three students and a volunteer from the nearby Pamunkey tribe and likely descendants of the original inhabitants -- worked the soil.

Since he and other archaeologists began digging for six weeks each summer six years ago, they have found that Werowocomoco was huge by the standards of Tidewater Indian villages of the same era -- about 40 acres. They found evidence, as they had expected, of busy village life near the riverbanks.

But the ditches are what capture their imagination. This year, they've uncovered roughly 700 feet of ditches. Some are parallel. Some begin to curve mysteriously away from the river. Could they be the mysterious "Double D" pattern that was drawn around Werowocomoco on a 17th-century Spanish map? And what did they mean?

In other Indian villages, ditches have been found around the outsides, remnants of defensive palisade walls, rather than right through the middle.