"The Public Meaning of Archeological Heritage"

A Seminar in Archaeology and Interpretation

 

Colonial Legacies and the Public Meaning of Monacan Archaeology in Virginia

Jeffrey L. Hantman - Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia

 

 

It is a long understood and difficult truth that the population size, territorial boundaries, social identities, and even the tribal names of many Native peoples in the Eastern United States were vastly transformed by the impact of European diseases and colonial domination. In the Virginia colony, the Algonquian (Powhatan) and Siouan (Monacan) speaking people were as dramatically affected, and as rapidly decimated in number, as any other people or region in the Middle and Southeastern United States between the 17^th and 18^th centuries  (see Wood, 1989).  The legacy of this colonial history in the modern-day interface between archaeology, Native American political concerns, and the larger public are a series of issues about territory, history, identity and the legitimacy of claims for cultural patrimony.  The ethnohistoric record in Virginia after the early seventeenth century is very thin, and oral traditions are not necessarily known or shared with outsiders. Archaeology, when done collaboratively with Tribal groups, is in a position to help address some of the contemporary public issues still extant as a result of colonial-era legacies. 

Over the past fifteen years, students from the University of Virginia and I have worked with the Monacan Indian Nation of central and western Virginia.  The interaction began as a straightforward, if limited, effort on my part to share information on research I was doing, and ideas I was publishing on the colonial-era Monacans.  It is pertinent here to acknowledge freely that when I began to do research and write about the archaeology and ethnohistory of 17^th -century Monacans and what I perceived as the formidable role they played in the Jamestown era in the Chesapeake, I was not aware that there was a contemporary Monacan Indian community of approximately 800 tribal members, based just one hour from the University of Virginia (today the tribal numbers are closer to 1400).  When I did first hear of the community, I heard many disparaging and unfounded assumptions about who they were, often from people who had not visited the community or met community members.  All this was a function of centuries of invisibility for Indians in the Virginia interior caused by colonial policies, population decline and the eugenics-driven racial categorizing policies of the 20^th-century in which Virginia tenaciously reclassified Indians into the generic category of “colored”  (Smith 1992).  It should be said, too, that the Monacan community also chose to be out of public view, a centuries-old survival strategy in the face of colonial and later state policies.  Situated just an hour from Charlottesville and less than that to Lynchburg, the Monacan community is nestled into the mountains ten miles from a major road.  It was relatively easy to be out of view.  For decades, Monacan children could not attend public schools.  An Episcopal Mission established in the early 20^th-century supported a one-room log cabin school that was in use through mid-century (see Figure 1). 

This all changed in the 1980s as the Monacans actively sought public recognition.  Official state recognition was awarded in 1989 after a thorough review of history and opinion sought from the other tribal groups in Virginia, and today the Monacans are one of eight state-recognized Indian tribes in Virginia, and the only one located in the western part of the state.  I first met with the Tribe shortly after this official and public affirmation of their identity had occurred. Outsiders were still met with understandable caution. I had been invited to attend a Tribal Council meeting to discuss the possibility of working jointly on a modest traveling museum exhibit about the Monacan community, past and present.  It was right at the outset that I realized that what I had considered important, but fairly esoteric, research on the Indian-English relations in colonial Virginia struck a positive chord with the Monacan people, and that archaeology in this region would have public meanings far beyond what I even imagined at that time. They understood the lingering impact of colonial-era history and subsequent state policy from their own experience.  The archaeology provided a new narrative and a counter-narrative. This prelude is all necessary to understanding the brief overview I offer below of the ways in which archaeology has had some impact on the Monacan community’s understanding of their own deep history, and on a public understanding of who this Virginia tribe was, and is, today.  I will focus on two issues, examples among many, that archaeological studies were able to address that are legacies of the colonial era: Invisibility/Continuity and Territory.

The story of colonial Indian history might seem well known – from the publication in the 17^th-century of the writings of Jamestown colonist John Smith, to the Disney animated film about Pocahontas and John Smith, to the planned anniversary commemoration of the settling of the Jamestown colony in 2007.  But the focus of that Indian history is actually quite limited – it addresses the people who lived in the area immediately surrounding Jamestown and only the early 17^th-century.  Until recently, most people throughout Virginia would have been hard-pressed to say more about other tribes, regions or time frames in Indian history.  And, this left the Monacans in a state of virtual invisibility, past and present. 

Identifying the late precolonial sites that my students and I were excavating in ancestral Monacan territory as Monacan sites, and referring to them by that name rather than in the jargon of archaeological culture complexes, was a first step towards connecting archaeology to Monacan history and ending that invisibility.  Part of the community’s difficulty in receiving recognition as Indian people in the 20^th-century could be tied to their comparatively obscure colonial and precolonial history. The archaeology served to offset that difficulty in simply documenting that people were on the landscape, there, and had been there for some time in continuous settlement of the region even if sites were moved frequently.  Further, they were agricultural and lived in villages. All of this offset erroneous perceptions that derived from colonial era ethnography. The Tribe evaluated what I was writing about Monacan archaeology and history, and selectively adopted some of it (as all people do) into their own histories and sense of their past.  While having a collective sense of a deep past is important, it was sharing that message with a modestly wider audience, which was of greatest interest in the early years of our collaboration.  

The idea of developing the small traveling exhibit was adopted by the Monacan Tribal Council.  A grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH) made the development of this exhibit possible, and the impact was fairly significant.  A traveling exhibit was desired as one which could be placed in schools, as leaders of the Tribe were now being asked to travel to local schools and discuss Monacan history and identity with students, teachers and curriculum planners (see Figure 2).  It is worth noting that archaeology and related ethnohistory was a small part of the exhibit. The Tribe was particularly interested in “talking” about the recent past and present in this exhibit. But, the archaeology served to connect this more recent history to a place in the deeper history of Virginia, as well as to the familiar Jamestown story.  In this way, the exhibit was a success. A video produced by members of the Tribe about this time also included archaeology and ethnohistory in establishing the deep history of the tribe for an audience new to the name and identity of Monacan.  The exhibit and video were widely distributed, most effectively to schools. The result helped to reverse the invisibility that even state recognition could not offset.

A final important issue concerns the dramatic transformations in territory from the colonial era and contemporary identification with ancestral territory.  The Monacan community of today is focused on one small community centered in an area called Bear Mountain, in Amherst County, Virginia.  Two centuries of settlement continuity there help establish the recent historic claims to tribal status in-state, but leave open, if not in fact obscuring, any connection to a larger territory.  It is the case that small expatriate communities of tribal members live today in Maryland, Tennessee, and Georgia, families whose parents or grandparents moved out of Virginia to avoid racist state laws and policies enacted during the eugenics era.  So, a fluid and non-contiguous tribal affiliation is not presumed in the present. 

On the basis of archaeological information including settlement pattern data and especially a distinctive burial mound complex, a larger territory that is Monacan can be discerned (but see Boyd 2003, Hantman et al. 2004).  The “original core” of what was Monacan territory is derived from a known place – that is, the area that is defined on John Smith’s map of Virginia as Monacan.  From there, archaeological survey and excavation data strongly suggested that a neighboring region given a different name by the colonial observers (Mannahoac) was virtually undifferentiated materially, or in terms of burial ritual, from the Monacan “core.”  The public implications of this archaeological research, vetted by the Monacan Tribe, relate largely to issues of cultural patrimony.  Human remains from two of the burial mounds have been returned to the Monacans following NAGPRA review of their claim, and the remains have been reinterred in the historic Monacan cemetery on Bear Mountain. In consultation with the Tribe, bioarchaeological analyses were conducted prior to the reinterrment (Gold 2004).  In another example, a collection of more than 20,000 artifacts collected in ancestral Monacan territory by amateurs, then curated by the National Park Service since the 1940s, is in the process of being returned to the Monacan Tribal Museum.  The University of Virginia is inventorying the collection so as to facilitate its transfer to the Monacan Indian Museum.

The public meanings of a Monacan archaeology begin with the value placed on the knowledge of deep history, and even individual identity (Hantman 2004), by the members of the Tribe themselves.  They extend to concerns beyond the boundaries of the Tribe to issues of public identity and acceptance, recognition, and legal status with respect to cultural patrimony issues.  The Monacans have come out of the long shadow created by colonial era writing and policy, and are now very much a part of the cultural history of the region as well as the contemporary political and cultural landscape.  Archaeological data have been one part of this very public transformation brought about by the Monacan people themselves.  

 

 

 

References Cited

Boyd, C. Clifford

2004    Monacans as Moundbuilders? American Antiquity 69:361-363.

 

Gold,  Debra L.

2004    The Bioarchaeology of the Virginia Mounds. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

 

Hantman, Jeffrey L.

2004    Monacan Meditation: Regional and Individual Archaeologies in the Contemporary Politics of Indian Heritage. In Places in Mind: Public Archaeology

            as Applied Anthropology, edited by Paul A. Shackel and Erve J. Chambers, pp.19- 34. Routledge, New York.

 

Hantman, Jeffrey L., Debra L. Gold, and Gary H. Dunham

2004    Of Parsimony and Archaeological Histories: A Response to Comment by Boyd. American Antiquity 69: 583–585.

 

Smith, J. David

1992    The Eugenic Assault on America. George Mason University Press, Fairfax, Va.

 

Wood, Peter H.

1989    The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685-1790. In Powhatan’s Mantle, edited by Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov and M.Thomas Hatley, pp. 35-103, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

 

 

back to top