James River Chiefdoms

by Gallivan, Martin D.; Levins, Richard A.

• ISBN13: 9780803221864
• ISBN10: 080322186X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

James River Chiefdoms explores puzzling discrepancies between the ethnohistoric and archaeological records of the Powhatan and Monacan societies met by Jamestown colonists in 1607. Where colonists described the coastal Powhatans and the Monacans of the James River interior in terms that evoke the anthropological notion of a chiefdom, the Chesapeake region's archaeological record lacks elements typically associated with complex polities.In an effort to account for these apparent incongruities, Martin D. Gallivan synthesizes ethnohistoric accounts with the archaeology of thirty-five Native settlements dating from A.D. 1-1610 to identify and illuminate social changes largely undetected by previous research. A comparative, quantitative analysis of residential archaeology in the James River Valley highlights a rearrangement of daily practices within Native villages between 1200 and 1500. James River villagers reorganized their domestic production, settlement organization, and regional interaction to create new funds of power within social settings perched between communally oriented cultural practices and exclusionary political strategies. During the early seventeenth-century colonial encounter, Native leaders were thus positioned to employ strategies that, for a time, eclipsed communal decision-making structures in the Chesapeake.James River Chiefdoms presents a novel perspective on an important chapter in the history of Native peoples in eastern North America and on early colonial America, offering an innovative interpretive approach to Native American culture history and the emergence of hierarchical political organizations in the Americas.Martin D. Gallivan is an associate professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary.

Author Biography

Martin D. Gallivan is an associate professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface: The Arrival of the Tassantasses
Acknowledgments
Understanding the Native Worlds of the Chesapeake	p. 1
The Natural and Social Landscapes of Tsenacomoco	p. 11
Archaeological Approaches to the Establishment of Village Life	p. 44
Sedentariness, Community Size, and Village Settlement	p. 75
The Domestic Economy	p. 88
Community Organization	p. 111
Regional Interaction	p. 126
A Historical Anthropology of Native Societies in the Chesapeake	p. 155
App. 1: A Descriptive Account of Sites in the Sample	p. 183
App. 2: Calculation of Residential Stability and Use-Duration Indices	p. 250
App. 3: Calculation of Households per Settlement from Feature Sherd Frequencies	p. 252
Notes	p. 255
Bibliography	p. 261
Index	p. 289
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