Werowocomoco: how Powhatan's lost capital was found and protected

Nothing above ground at Werowocomoco remains of the Indian community that once lived there, and for centuries nobody could say exactly where it had been. Then, in 2001, archeologists visiting a couple who lived on the York River at Purtan Bay recognised that the pottery fragments and projectile points the owners had gathered from their eroding shoreline might mark the lost site of Powhatan's headquarters.

A gathering after 400 years

On February 15, 2003, a small group walked the fields and shoreline of the site, among them Virginia Indians from seven tribes. The National Park Service says it was the largest, and possibly the first, native presence there in some 400 years, although Indians had hunted, fished and raised families on this land for thousands of years. Werowocomoco is in Gloucester County, Virginia, on the north side of the York River, which in the early 1600s was known as the Pamaunke. Fields and forest surround a private house at the end of a long gravel road, and the rural landscape is largely intact.

Powhatan's place

The name comes from the Virginia Algonquian language and means roughly "place of leadership". It was the home of the powerful political and spiritual leader Powhatan, and his daughter Pocahontas could be found there too. Scholars believe that from the late 1500s Powhatan built a chiefdom that may have influenced dozens of communities along the rivers of the southern Chesapeake Bay, including the ancestors of the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Upper Mattaponi and probably the Nansemond and Rappahannock. The Chickahominy lay near the centre but stayed independent and did not pay him tribute.

The English founded James Fort, soon Jamestown, on the neighbouring James River in spring 1607. Captain John Smith wrote that he was captured and brought to Werowocomoco in December 1607, where he met Powhatan and Pocahontas. By 1609 relations had worsened as the English kept demanding food; Powhatan moved his headquarters farther inland, and Werowocomoco fell silent. For the centuries after that its identity as a native place survived mostly in the ink of colonial explorers' maps and accounts. The Indian perspective was not documented.

Finding it again

Archeologists, with help from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the National Park Service and the National Endowment for the Humanities, ran field sessions at the site until 2010. The team formed a partnership with Virginia Indians that the Park Service calls the first archeological project to take place with their sustained guidance and participation. Its Virginia Indian Advisory Board had representatives of the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock, Nansemond and Chickahominy tribes, and gave advice on research goals, public outreach and the handling of artifacts. The work showed that the history of the place began centuries before Powhatan lived there.

Protecting it

The text above is adapted from the National Park Service's handbook on Virginia Indians at Werowocomoco.

Sources

• National Park Service, "A Story Written on the Land: Recovering the Site of Werowocomoco" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/werowocomoco-brief-history.htm), excerpted from "Virginia Indians at Werowocomoco: A National Park Handbook"; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The page's photographs, credited to a university-led research group and individual photographers, are not used here.