Geography

Land & Water

Note: The following information is taken with permission from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources Web pages entitled, "First People: The Early Indians of Virginia" at http://www.dhr.virginia.gov/arch_NET/timeline/time_line.htm. The information from the Web pages is taken from the book First People: The Early Indians of Virginia, produced by the Department of Historic Resources, and published by the University Press of Virginia.

Some archaeologists use the concept of "cultural and natural areas" to explain further how the distinct cultures of the era came about. According to their theory, the environment in which a society settled presented a particular setting and the people made choices within that setting. Without external forces, a culture was inclined to change slowly once it adjusted to a setting. It was also inclined to spread over an entire area before expanding to a different environment. In Virginia, the Coastal Plain, Piedmont, and mountain regions created distinct natural areas. Cultures spread along the major rivers and streams that flowed within and between each province. Because pieces of the information puzzle are missing, much of the group variation across Virginia has not been fully described nor individual cultures defined.

Blue Ridge Mountains
The mountains and valleys of Southwest Virginia formed a crossroads of Native American culture. Mississippian people entered the region along the Tennessee River system. Ohio Valley groups came in by way of the New River (one of the oldest rivers in the world). And Piedmont cultures advanced up the Roanoke River.

The people of Southwest Virginia formed a tribal culture known for its wide use of limestone, sand, or shell tempered pottery impressed with cord and net; dome shaped homes about 20 feet in diameter clustered around a plaza in the center of a fenced village; and lifestyles based on intensive gardening, supplemented with wild plants and animals.

Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley
The people who built mounds lived in sedentary villages along the major rivers, typically on and alongside the soils with high agricultural potential. Like their neighbors, they practiced a combination of farming and hunting and gathering.

Remains of corn and squash have been found in cooking and trash pits in village sites along the James River in the Piedmont. The people in the Piedmont made most of their stone tools from the locally abundant white quartz from the Shenandoah Valley and surrounding mountains. They used high quality stones in trade throughout the region. Two rare resources in the region were soapstone and copper.

Coastal Plain (Tidewater)
The Coastal Plains offered a unique environment of saltwater and freshwater rivers, bays, and marshes. People adapted to it by relying on fishing, particularly for the shad and sturgeon that ascended rivers to spawn. From the shallow waters, they gathered shellfish. The Coastal Plain Indians stored large amounts of food to support themselves. By the 1300s, the Coastal Plain tribes had grown to form sedentary villages supported by small short-term hunting and gathering camps. Relying more and more on farming, they favored the floodplain and low-lying necklands of rich sandy soil for village sites. The Coastal Plain people built their villages with longhouses close together and perhaps surrounded by a palisade, or with the houses dispersed, separated by fields for gardening.

The Powhatans depended on the rivers and the Bay to provide a means of traveling to other villages. They fished the waters for food and used the streams and creeks for drinking water. They did much of their fishing from canoes. The canoe was the main source of transportation for the Powhatans. It was the largest item the men built. The biggest canoes were four feet deep and fifty feet long, and each could hold up to forty men. The average canoe was smaller, holding ten to thirty people, including their goods. When traveling, a warrior might have carried a deerskin mantle, traditional weaponry, mats for temporary shelter, and a ceramic pot for cooking. Most canoes were made from cypress trees. The size of the canoe depended on the size of the tree. Once the tree was selected, it was "cut" down by alternating between burning and chipping away at the charred area above ground level. The log would then be hollowed out. To help "cut" the hard wood, a fire would be set on the log. The burned areas would be chipped out with a shell or stone scraper. Someone had to stay close to the fire so that it did not burn out of control and destroy the entire log. The finished canoe was long with a flat or V-shaped bottom.

Coastal Virginia is unique because of its combined size, number, and proximity of its major estuaries of the Chesapeake Bay. Within fifty miles of the Virginia coast, there are four major rivers. Three of these rivers were capable of carrying large European craft as well as large Indian canoes more than a hundred mile northwestward into the interior. Considering richness of marine food sources and the ease of travel by water, it is not surprising to find that among the chiefdoms formed the Powhatan empire of eastern Virginia was by far the largest. There are four major rivers in all, the Potomac, Rappahannock, York, and the James, none of them more than twenty miles from another, flowing in parallel courses from northwest to southeast.