With this book, Martin Gallivan returns to an area he knows well, the Virginia coastal plain, Tsenacomacoh in Algonquian, the small but complex region between the James and York Rivers. This can be treacherous territory, fraught with the legacies of Jamestown and Powhatan. Even the term Powhatan is slippery and can refer “to a man, the town where he was born, a tidal river, a political territory . . . [or] a paramount chiefdom” (p. 1). Gallivan's goal is to reorient the archaeology of the Chesapeake away from colonial accounts to one constructed from an aboriginal sense of place, community, and interconnectedness. It is an opportunity to examine this Algonquian landscape in terms of spatial relations, persistent places, and coevolution of the cultural and natural factors.
There is much to admire. Gallivan's approach is multidisciplinary and he is careful to integrate Native perspectives and participation with present-day issues of site preservation, loss, and protection. Of particular value are summaries of recent fieldwork and previous work along the Chickahominy. Gallivan uses these data to explore time depth, arguing that a shift toward estuarine-oriented subsistence practices, the use of shell-tempered (Mockley) ceramics, and the spread of Algonquian speech converged circa A.D. 200 to create “the historic roots of the Algonquian landscape of Tsenacomacoh” (pp. 102–103). He also uses the settlement data, mortuary analysis, and dietary shifts at Werowocomoco to trace the establishment of this horticulturally oriented town ca. A.D. 1200 and its growth until 1608. Finally, Gallivan examines the degree to which the archaeological record reflects the complex alliances and rivalries that underlay the Powhatan chiefdom and historical events as recorded by English colonists.
Still, this is a book with two titles, and while the first is successful, the latter is not. One problem is focus. Is this a multidisciplinary study of a particular landscape, an argument for advocacy and Native involvement, an attempt to reconcile the historical and archaeological records, or a summary of regional archaeology? As is, the text jumps among topics, leaving the reader disoriented and unsatisfied. There are also significant gaps and problems of context and scale. Other than ceramics, there is little discussion of material culture. The mention of copper is cursory at best. Considering that Powhatan “effectively monopolized the flow of copper from the colonists” (p. 163), one would expect a robust description and discussion. Glass beads fare no better. Marine shell, perhaps the most sensitive material indicator of status, is not discussed at all. This lack of specifics leaves Gallivan's arguments superficial and untethered.
Equally problematic, few comparisons are made with related sites, even those previously discussed (Gallivan, James River Chiefdoms, 2003). Potomac Creek/Patawomeke is mentioned only briefly, and similar sites on the Maryland side of the Potomac are hardly noted at all. The same problem exists with mortuary sites. While Gallivan provides valuable new information, he does not integrate it with the existing data from the region, making it impossible to evaluate either the accuracy or acuity his arguments.
The larger the temporal and spatial scale, the greater this lack of fit. The Chesapeake has an eastern as well as a western shore. Gallivan's argument for the coalescence of Algonquian culture ignores recent evidence from eastern shore sites that Mockley ware was used a millennium earlier (Rick and Lowery, American Antiquity 78[3] 2013). Marine shell demonstrates the problem another way. Delmarva sites were the primary source of marine shell across the Northeast for millennia prior to the arrival of Europeans. As John Smith observed in 1608, it was the eastern shore “where is made so much Rawranoke or white [discoidal] beads.” Smith also noted that the Nanticoke were “the best Marchants of all other Savages” (Barbour, Works of Captain John Smith, II: 165, 1986). What does this imply about Powhatan as a paramount chiefdom?
This lack of regional context undercuts Gallivan's goal of seeing Powhatan in a more balanced perspective. What if the first English settlement had been on the Potomac instead of the James? What if it had been Patawomeke people who were so closely observed and documented? Would Werowocomoco still stand out as “the hub of the Powhatan tributary network and the center of a multitiered paramount chiefdom” (p. 4)? This book does not provide a basis for addressing, much less answering, this question. Instead, the archaeological evidence is used to flesh out the accepted historical narrative, not to test it. The Chesapeake watershed is, arguably, the most important drainage on the eastern coast of North America, one whose archaeological history is much broader than Algonquian people on its western shore. While this book is a valuable contribution, it also demonstrates how much the Chesapeake still has to teach us.
