Starting about 18,000 years ago, Paleoindians, the first humans to inhabit the Americas, lived in small groups throughout the Chesapeake Bay region and across North America, creating vast networks of trade and alliance reflected in shared stone tools such as the Clovis point. About 8,000 years later, population increased substantially as people adopted new technologies including pottery and the bow and arrow. Roughly 900 years ago, Native American groups began to raise corn, adding it to a complex diet of foraged plants, hunted animals, fish, and shellfish, while Algonquian groups in eastern Virginia developed a five-season yearly subsistence cycle focused around riverine ecology. Artistic expression and craft also evolved, and the wide variety of graphic designs found on pottery fragments suggests distinct traditions throughout the Powhatan chiefdom and beyond. In the 1500s, Wahunsenacawh, Chief Powhatan, inherited political authority over six Native communities in eastern Virginia, and by 1607, when the English colonists settled Jamestown, he had created a chiefdom encompassing the 32 Algonquian-speaking tribes of Tsenacomacoh.

Photo: Brandon D Cross

Gloucester Point, Virginia · USA