Va. Archaeological Findings Unveil Complex Society
By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
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.
The archaeologists began analyzing the artifacts they were finding.
Near the river, they found cooking pots and vessels of every size and shape. But on the other side of the ditches, they found serving vessels and smaller bowls of the type used only by chiefs for feasts, where each guest was given a separate bowl. They found ceramics that had originated throughout the Southeast, perhaps brought to chiefs as tribute or as gifts by visiting delegations.
They found postholes of the largest Indian house of this era found in the state, more than 70 feet long and 22 feet wide. The house sits about 600 paces from the river, exactly where Smith described Powhatan's house. And they found copper, prized by the Indians and hoarded by Powhatan, the chemical composition of which matches copper scraps from Jamestown.
All the evidence pointed to the ditches as monuments. "The landscape was intentionally structured to reflect the power of the place," Gallivan said, "and the importance of the people residing at that place."
Now, they're thinking that Powhatan, who was born farther inland and inherited only a handful of tribes, most likely chose to make Werowocomoco his capital once he consolidated power over 30 tribes and became paramount chief.
"This shows that Powhatan was a remarkable politician," said Randy Turner, an archaeologist with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and a member of the research group. "He was viewed as a godlike individual. And if our hypothesis is correct, he was using the sacred nature of this place to further validate his status not only as a political and military leader, but a spiritual and religious one."
The discoveries of an ancient and complex Indian past at Werowocomoco are shedding new light on the events of 1607 and beyond. By 1609, after six increasingly tense visits by the English -- once when they tried to crown Powhatan a vassal of King James and the last when Smith wanted to kidnap him and steal his food -- Powhatan left Werowocomoco forever.
"That says something quite profound about the effect that the English were having on the native people," said David Silverman, a historian at George Washington University. "Now that we're finding that Werowocomoco had been the center of Powhatan Indian life for a very long time, it could not have been a lighthearted decision."
Although archaeologists and historians have known for decades the likely location of Powhatan's capital, it remained officially "lost."
But for many years, historians and archaeologists had their eyes trained on colonial America onward. What few "prehistoric" Indian sites were excavated were largely found by accident, before a golf course or a bridge was about to be built.
"Werowocomoco was not a priority," Brown said. "Nor did it become one until 2001 with the right landowner, some pretty lucky archaeology and, quite honestly, the right political moment. We could have done an excavation like this 20 years ago, but it wouldn't have been as important as it is now."
The right political moment is the commemoration of Jamestown's 400th anniversary. And the right landowners are Bob and Lynn Ripley, who fell in love with the riverfront property and bought it in 1996. Lynn Ripley got into the habit of walking the land with her dogs every day. Almost immediately, she began picking up things that edged their way out of the dirt -- broken glass, crockery, old medicine bottles.
One day she saw a tiny, thin-lipped bottle with a crosshatched design. "I just knew it was Indian," Ripley said. She began to look more closely on her walks and started to find arrowheads, pipe stems, pottery. Her cache of native artifacts soon outgrew the shoebox lids where she kept them. So she bought two gun safes and began arranging the pieces in glass cases.
In 2001, Brown and his partner, Thane Harpole, were visiting potential archaeological sites and paid a call to the Ripleys. When Brown and Harpole saw Ripley's collection, they knew they were onto something big. Together with the College of William and Mary and the state's Department of Historic Resources, they created the research group and met with tribal leaders from the eight state-recognized tribes to create an advisory council, the first of its kind in Virginia.
Now, every summer, Ripley goes out to dig with the archaeologists. She no longer picks up artifacts, only sticks little flags in the ground so the archaeologists can analyze the finds in context. And Bob Ripley, a former commonwealth's attorney, no longer plants corn in the excavation area. When the Ripleys decided to build an addition onto the house, they refused to put in a basement, so as not to disturb the subsoil. They are in the process of ensuring that, after their deaths, their property will be run by a private foundation, with Virginia Indians on the board, to continue researching and educating the public.
"We want to keep it a sacred site," Bob Ripley said. "Because that's what it is."
That's something Stephen R. Atkins, chief of the Chickahominy tribe, and Ann "Little Fawn" Richardson, chief of the Rappahannock, said they felt in their bones when they walked the site. "It was pouring rain and very windy, and I felt led to this certain place. When I got there, I smelled smoke. There were no fires burning that day," Richardson said. "It was an incredible spiritual experience."
For Atkins, it is fitting that the secrets of Werowocomoco are coming to light with the attention centered on Jamestown. "The primary driver around the work at Jamestown has been to teach people about the invaders," he said. "But one can't look at Werowocomoco now without acknowledging that these were a civilized people. These were not savages.
"It's time for Werowocomoco to take its rightful place in history."
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