Beyond Jamestown

When Jeffrey Hantman came to the University of Virginia in 1983, he noticed that certain aspects of local history seemed to be missing from our common awareness and academic understanding.

As an archaeologist, Hantman was interested in native cultures and was drawn to the looming 400th anniversary celebration of the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Steeped in the aura of Thomas Jefferson that permeates the University, he was also fascinated by the nearby fieldwork of the man who is credited with being the first archaeologist in North America.

“I read it a million times,” Hantman declares of textbook descriptions of Jefferson’s work: “‘… Digging at a site near his home Monticello on the Rivanna River, he used scientific methodology to open up an Indian burial ground, which may have contained up to 1,000 individuals. ...’”

But who were these Indians that Jefferson studied, the associate professor of archaeology wanted to know. How did they relate to other native tribes of the Chesapeake area? And what was their role in the English settlement of Jamestown?

As he researched these questions, Hantman joined with modern Monacans, and together they are filling in the blank spaces in the history of the people who inhabited much of Central Virginia well into the Colonial period.

Hantman and his crew of graduate students have excavated a mound site nearly identical to, and contemporary with, “Jefferson’s Mound” and analyzed artifacts from other sites. Their work at what is now known to be the Monacan village of Monasukapanough connects the dots that lead from settlements along the rivers of Central Virginia dating back 1,000 years or more, through pejorative references to “a barbarous and rude people” in John Smith’s 17th-century journal, to the handful of individuals who refused to surrender to Virginia’s eugenics laws in the 20th century, and arriving at the modern-day Monacan Indian Nation that continues to thrive in Amherst County today.

“We start history in every classroom in Virginia at 1607,” Hantman asserts, “which makes it almost like a mystical or inevitable event, and it was anything but.” The Jamestown settlement of 1607 was merely the first successful settlement. Two previous attempts to colonize Virginia failed, and the question for Hantman was why.

“In researching the history,” Hantman explains, “it didn’t take long to find out that those early attempts failed because the Indians that lived in the region rejected the colonists. And I thought if we’re going to understand the Indian side of this incredible moment in the history of the Western Hemisphere, we need to put the actions of the Powhatan Indians into a larger context.”

As Hantman considers the politics and trade relations of the times, he theorizes that John Smith developed a working relationship with the coastal tribe of Pocahontas and her father, Chief Powhatan, because he and other colonists knew of their great interest in copper.

“Copper was the sacred symbol of authority and power,” Hantman explains. The mineral represented a connection to the gods, and Powhatan chiefs gained their power and marked their status with images forged from the metal. But there was no copper in the coastal regions. The inland Monacans may have been bitter enemies with the Powhatans, but they had access to copper.

Operating on detailed information sent back to England from the failed Roanoke Colony in the 1580s, John Smith arrived in Virginia bearing gifts made of a rich, red copper. Hantman believes a major reason these Jamestown colonists were allowed to survive was that Chief Powhatan saw them as a new, higher-quality source of the coveted copper, a providence that meant he would no longer need to negotiate with his reviled rivals to the west.

“John Smith never explored this area,” Hantman explains. “His [Powhatan] guides wouldn’t take him past their own territory into the Piedmont.”

Smith refers to the people of the Piedmont in his journal and identifies 12 Monacan villages, including Monasukapanough, on his map of the area that was published in England in 1612. This account, however, describes the Monacans in dismissive terms and makes them appear insignificant in the larger politics of the region.

Monacans seem to have retreated from the Europeans, choosing not to engage these people whom they viewed as conquerors. Indeed, Hantman’s work at Monasukapanough turned up no evidence of European artifacts. But radiocarbon dating of other objects makes it clear Monacans lived there at least into the 18th century.

“The mounds have great significance, because they’re a measure of permanence,” Hantman declares. “It’s where the ancestors are buried, and it conveys a very different picture than anyone had ever painted of the native history in this region.”

From the point of view of European colonists, “Indian history seems to stop at 1607 once the English are here,” Hantman says. “Monasukapanough has shown that the Indian people in the Piedmont carried on with their lives and that Jamestown didn’t transform the world.”