Showing posts with label Powhatan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Powhatan. Show all posts

Friday, June 21, 2013

Virginia to preserve Pocahontas home


by Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Pocahontas, Capt. John Smith and Chief Powhatan get their due Friday in a dedication ceremony that preserves the village site that made them famous.
Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell and Native American tribal officials will dedicate the Werowocomoco (WER-ruh-wo-KOM-uh-ko) site near Gloucester, Va., in a day-long event. Now an archaeological site, the village appears to have held a longhouse, judging from postholes, where Smith famously encountered Powhatan after the founding of Jamestown in 1607.

"One of the most significant archaeological sites in North America, it is where settlers and Native Americans first encountered each other," says archaeologist Martin Gallivan of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
A renowned part of colonial-era folklore (and a Disney movie), the rescue of Capt. John Smith by Pocahontas would have occurred at the site, if it really happened, which historians largely doubt. First recounted in a 1624 book, the story goes that after capturing Smith and bringing him to their chief's longhouse, Powhatan's tribesmen were ready to "beate out his braines," when Pocahontas took his head in her own arms to stop his execution. Smith didn't write about the rescue in his earliest accounts of the colony, but he did provide a description of the location of Chief Powhatan's village and longhouse in later accounts that match Werowocomoco. Already on the National Register of Historic Places, the village was the capital of Powhatan's kingship over Virginia's Tidewater region and will be precluded from residential or business development.

"It's a tip of the hat to the first 15,000 years of the American story," says Charles Mann, author of 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. "Powhatan and the empire he put together were major players in 16th- and 17th-century East Coast history - important in their own right and not just because they were unlucky enough to be descended upon by the English."
In Smith's accounts of his capture by Powhatan's tribe, he describes a chief's longhouse that in its floor layout matches the 72-foot-long-by-20-foot-wide floor plan seen at the site. A longhouse was typically built with trees bent over in a semicircle with woven mats fixed across the top and sides. Some historians say Smith mistook a tribal induction ceremony as a near-brush with beheading in his account of his capture in 1607.

Gallivan and his team have uncovered more than a dozen copper scraps at the longhouse site, ones that chemically match European trade items used by Jamestown's colonists and also found at that site, which was about 16 miles away from Werowocomoco. Werowocomoco was located on a shallow bay on the York River, while Jamestown was on swampy ground on the James River. "Only chiefs controlled copper at the time. Its red color was ritually significant in their mythology," says Gallivan, who will speak at the dedication ceremony.
In 2001, landowners Lynn and George Ripley had collected artifacts on their farm, which led to excavation of the site. "They have been very generous and put up with us ripping up their front yard for 10 years," Gallivan says. The archaeological work was conducted with the input of six Native American tribes related to the Algonquin group descended from Powhatan's tribe.

After 1609, which was a very hard year - "the Starving Time" for Jamestown - fewer and fewer Native Americans appear to have lived at Werowocomoco. Powhatan relocated to villages farther west, for example. The ultimate goal would be to see the site become a national park, Gallivan says. "Jamestown and Williamsburg only tell one part of the story from the colonial era, we could tell another side at Werowocomoco."

http://www.freep.com/usatoday/article/2442547  Link back to original story site.





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Thursday, June 20, 2013

Pocahontas, John Smith, Rescue Site In Spotlight, Gloucester, VA

Written by
Steve Szkotak
Associated Press
English: Plate 10 of an illustration based on ...
English: Plate 10 of an illustration based on the work of John White, however, this is used by John Smith and Strachey at Jamestown to document Virginia Indian communities. #3 is described as a tomahawk. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)



GLOUCESTER, VA. — A farm field overlooking the York River in Tidewater Virginia is believed to be where Pocahontas interceded with her powerful father Powhatan to rescue English Capt. John Smith from death.

That’s a fanciful footnote for many Virginia Indians, historians and archaeologists, who say the real story is that this land was the center of a complex, sprawling empire ruled by Powhatan long before the first permanent English settlement in America was founded in 1607.

It was called Werowocomoco, which roughly translates to a “place of chiefs.”

“This is like our Washington,” said Kevin Brown, chief of the Pamunkey tribe. “History didn’t begin in 1607, and there are a lot of people who overlook that.”

On loan to archaeologists for more than a decade, these 57 privately owned acres will be preserved forever under an agreement years in the making and to be officially announced Friday.

The deal is important for Native Americans because they believe their story has been overshadowed for centuries by the narrative of Smith and his fellow Europeans. In a departure from past digs involving native sites, archaeologists sought the counsel of Indian leaders before and during the exploration, honoring their wishes that burial grounds not be disturbed and helping interpret what was discovered.

For Ashley Atkins, a College of William & Mary doctoral candidate who has worked at the site since 2005, “recovering things out of the ground” was secondary to working with her fellow Pamunkey.

“Unfortunately, native people in the past have had no involvement at all in the way that their history has been investigated, uncovered and presented to the public,” said Atkins, who is 28. “Most people would think, ‘They wouldn’t be involved in uncovering your own history?’ But the reality is that has not been the common practice.”

Jeff Brown, a Pamunkey and Kevin Brown’s brother, worked at the site for years. He recalled Indians visiting the sweeping expanse overlooking the York River and being overcome.



“It gets emotional,” he said. “And when you’re digging you can really feel it.”

Martin Gallivan, a William & Mary anthropologist, said the involvement of native people “enhanced the project immensely.”

Only a fraction of Werewocomoco has been explored, perhaps just 2 percent.

After decades of research, archaeologists used the writings of Smith and others, ancient maps and detective work to conclude with near-certainty that this was Powhatan’s seat of power about 15 miles from Jamestown.

Powhatan’s chiefdom covered 30 political divisions and a population of 15,000 to 20,000 people while Jamestown settlers struggled to survive. Excavations have yielded the outline of the largest longhouse ever found in Virginia and a system of ditches that may have separated sacred and secular areas.

Randolph Turner, a retired state archaeologist whose hunt for Werewocomoco dates to the 1970s, said Powhatan’s empire was “one of the most complex political entities in all of eastern North America.”

The leader “had the power of life and death” and expanded his empire through warfare or the threat of warfare.

“He’s one of the most interesting political and military figures that I’ve ever read about,” Turner said. “And we’re just getting hints in the historical records of all he accomplished in his lifetime.”

The discovery of Werewocomoco can be credited to a purebred dog belonging to the land’s owners, Lynn and Robert Ripley.

Lynn Ripley used to walk around their land with her Chesapeake Bay Retriever, an American Kennel Club competitor named Mobjack Rhett Master Hunter.

She would remove debris that could cut her dog’s paws, and found arrowheads, spear tips, pipe stems and pottery shards.

“I just seemed to have an eye for it,” she said. “That’s how it all began, so our dog wouldn’t cut his feet. It’s like we were meant to be there and I was meant to find these things.”

The clincher was the discovery of copper, which was valued by the Indians as gold is today.

“I am absolutely convinced this is Werewocomoco,” Turner said. “It makes no sense for it to be anywhere else.”

That conclusion is supported by the U.S. Park Service, William & Mary, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.

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