Powhatan's Werowocomoco: Constructing Place, Polity, and Personhood in the Chesapeake, C.E. 1200‐‐C.E. 1609

Abstract

Colonial encounters within the Powhatan village of Werowocomoco in Tidewater Virginia have captured the public's imagination through romantic literature and popular films. Shifting the focus of inquiry away from English colonial narratives and toward a history of landscape provides an alternative understanding of Werowocomoco as a Native place. Archaeological investigation has identified evidence of earthworks and related social practices that altered Werowocomoco's built environment and subjective experiences of its spaces in ways that colonial chroniclers failed to appreciate. A landscape history combining built environments, cognitive maps, and spatial practices across the historic—precontact divide indicates that the settlement became a ritualized location for the production of political status and social personhood well before English colonization in the Chesapeake. Spatial practices rooted in Algonquian cosmology and centered on Werowocomoco shaped the origins of the Powhatan chiefdom and early colonial history through which Powhatans sought to incorporate Jamestown colonists into their world. A biography of Werowocomoco as a Native place illustrates how a deep historical anthropology may challenge notions of a “prehistoric” past comprised of homogenized societies lacking history.