interpreter explaining Native American canoe construction
with fire and scraping, at Jamestown Settlement
The first Virginians were hunters. They saw elk, moose, deer, bear, bison, wolves, even some mastodons and mammoths. They developed new tools to hunt game, such as the atl-atl throwing stick, the polished axe, and ultimately the bow-and-arrow to accompany their earlier stone scrapers and points. They developed canoes, floated all the Virginia rivers, and even paddled across the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore.
 mud protecting edge of canoe as fire carves center |
 final canoe, from Henricus Historical Park |
The cultural patterns of the first Virginians evolved - technological change started long before computers and the Internet. The original small (perhaps just family-based) groups coalesced into organized tribes. At the time of European arrival, one group of tribes centered along the York River was organized into what approximated a political state, with a paramount chief and control over multiple tribes. It is a stretch to call Powhatan's organization an "empire" comparable to the political units in Europe that sponsored voyages of discovery, but the organization of his government suggests he was approaching the structure of a political confederacy based on more than kinship ties. Tribes paid tribute to Powhatan; he was superior in authority over them.
Evidence is clear that "Indians" were living in Virginia roughly 12,000 years ago (BPE or Before the Present Era, equivalent to 10,000 B.C.) The Virginia shoreline was much further to the east then. The level of the Atlantic Ocean was lower, with fresh water locked up in the glaciers of that era and much of the continental shelf exposed. One day, when underwater archeology is much easier, we may discover a great deal of undisturbed information about the first Virginians - way out there on the Outer Continental Shelf, as much as 30 miles offshore from Virginia Beach.
Those first arrivals saw global warming occur, with major effects on the landscape. Chesapeake Bay is only 3,000 years old. The earliest Virginians would have seen the valley of the Susquehanna River drown, would have watched the Chesapeake Bay form as the Atlantic Ocean rose. Those early immigrants would have seen the spruce and fir forests retreat to the north, as the environment shifted towards an oak-hickory-pine forest.
Not many Paleo-Indian sites found in Virginia are older than 10,000 years. One of the oldest known sites is Daugherty's Cave on Big Cedar Creek (a tributary of the Clinch River) in Russell County. Charcoal from a campfire there, excavated from its burial under layers of more recent sediments, has been dated back to 8,000 years ago. There must be far more archeological resources than we have discovered, but modern Virginia development has disturbed the original sites.
Some Europeans such as Jean Jacques Rousseau viewed the Indians as noble savages. More likely, the original residents of what is now Virginia had their own conflicts associated with "turf," long before the English settled at Jamestown in 1607. The original Virginians did not live in peace and harmony, where everyone just got along with everyone else until the Europeans brought discord to America. In 1607, John Smith discovered that the Algonquian-speaking tribes under Powhatan's control blocked access to the protein-rich estuaries of the Chesapeake Bay from Siouan-speaking tribes further inland. The Siouan-speaking Manahoac and Monacan tribes west of the Fall Line could not collect shellfish from Tidewater Virginia.
Controlling food resources did not come without a fight. The Potowomack tribe built a log pallisade to enclose their town at the mouth of Aquia Creek, perhaps for protection from the tribes under Powhatan (to the soth) as much as from the Manahoacs (to the west) and the Piscataways (to the north).
Such fortifications were not unique to Tidewater. A similar barricade was also built by those who lived along Wolf Creek in Southwestern Virginia, as much as eight centuries ago. Archeological surveys enable us today to determine that these wooden walls were substantial, as shown in Theodore DeBry's engravings of a fortified town near the Roanoke Colony in the 1580's.
