Managing a Dynamic Landscape

Starting around 2,000 years ago, Native peoples living along the Chesapeake Bay increasingly shaped their environment by clearing forests, building large camps along rivers, and using fire to create a deliberate mosaic of cleared land, grasslands, and forests. This landscape emerged through intertwined natural and human histories: thirty-five million years ago, a meteor struck waters along the Atlantic coast and created a crater that shaped the Chesapeake Bay, then over millions of years changing sea levels alternated the area between dry land and shallow sea until warming about 10,000 years ago pushed seawater into Virginia’s lower rivers and created the bay and its tidal ecology. The Chesapeake estuary reached its current form about 5,000 years ago, with broad rivers flowing into the bay and tides carrying salty water upstream, and Native peoples learned to tend these estuary-based ecological systems while sustaining thriving societies. The ancestors of the Powhatans built larger settlements, cleared trees with stone axes, and left middens containing oysters, clams, crabs, pottery, and stone tools; one excavated midden across the river contained an estimated 200 million oyster shells, and although Powhatans across the Chesapeake region harvested billions of oysters, shell sizes and quantities in the middens did not decline over time, suggesting careful management of harvests. In Tsenacomacoh, placemaking centered on the relationship between land and water as experienced from a canoe, and seasonal life followed a five-season round in which Powhatans left riverside towns in Popanow for communal winter hunts, fished and cleared fields while women planted corn, beans, and squash in Cattapeuk, moved between towns and forest foraging during Cohatayough, began harvests in Nepinough, and gathered in the towns of local chiefs for feasts and ceremonies during Taquitock.

Virginia · United States