More than 400 years ago, British settler and explorer John Smith wrote in his diary that there was a Native American village along a large river in what is now Virginia. However, the location of the reported village was later forgotten and its existence was debated.
Archaeologists currently excavating along the Rappahannock River have uncovered thousands of artifacts, including beads, pottery shards, stone tools, and tobacco pipes, that are believed to have come from the village Smith described centuries ago.
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Key parts of the river are lined with high cliffs, which would have limited access to the villages above them, King said. But the village’s height there would provide a top-down view of the entire river valley, and the soil at the site would have been suitable for growing corn, King told Live Science in an email.
The river is named for the Rappahannock Tribe, one of the 11 Native American tribes recognized in Virginia. Many of the tribes still live nearby and want to reclaim and protect their ancestral lands along the river, King said.
History of Rappahannock
Smith served as a mercenary and adventurer in Europe until 1608, when he was elected president of the council of the Jamestown colony in Virginia. (Jamestown was founded a year earlier and is recognized as the first British settlement in North America).
Smith was a self-aggrandizing figure who left behind a “larger-than-life” legend, including his purported love story with Pocahontas. His letters and witness testimony indicate that Smith enforced military-style discipline at Jamestown, where he famously proclaimed, “He who will not work shall not eat.” This policy is credited with saving the colony from early starvation, but after John Smith returned to England in 1609, over 400 Jamestown settlers starved to death.
King said Smith was an avid explorer who spent weeks mapping the Rappahannock River and writing about the Native American villages that later became the Forness Cliffs area.
The new findings also match the oral history of the Rappahannock people, King said.
“Memory isn’t perfect, but neither is documentation, so oral history gets a bad rap in some places,” she said. “The strategy is to read both sources for or against and question everything.”
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Dr. King and his colleagues have been studying the early history of the Rappahannock River region for several years. They located the Fonnes Cliff settlement by cross-referencing historical documents and oral history and “walking the land,” she said.
Researchers have now unearthed around 11,000 Aboriginal artefacts from two sites at Fornes Cliff, some of which may date back to the 1500s.
land claim
According to Smith’s book, in the 17th century, the Rappahannocks agreed to sell approximately 25,000 acres (10,100 hectares) of land to the Jamestown Colony for the price of 30 blankets, beads, and some tools. However, such land transactions between Europeans and Native Americans are often debated by historians. For example, it is unclear whether Native Americans understood “selling land” the same way Europeans did at the time. Researchers previously told Live Science that these types of land deals may have been perceived as regional “sharing” or “renting.”
The newly discovered artifacts could impact development in the area, King said.
“The Rappahannock people understand the Great River Valley as their homeland, regardless of who owns the land today,” she says. So the tribe is working with private partners and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to purchase and protect prime sites.
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, a historian at New York University and an expert on Smith and early Jamestown who was not involved in the discovery, told Live Science in an email that she reviewed her map with the Chesapeake-Algonquin people who accompanied Smith on the expedition.
“Significant discoveries like this one have resulted from the partnerships archaeologists have established with modern-day indigenous peoples like the Rappahannocks,” she said.
David Price, an independent historian and author of “The Love and Hate of Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Beginning of a New Nation” (Vintage, 2005), who was not involved in the study, called the newly discovered artifacts “an amazing discovery.”
“They deepen our knowledge of the interactions between the Rappahannock people and the British, particularly during the fragile early years of British exploration, when Native communities and settlers shaped each other’s histories through trade, diplomacy, and conflict,” he told Live Science.
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