Discovery raises questions about Pocahontas' people

WEROWOCOMOCO, Va. - When archaeologists began digging in a cornfield one steamy summer day on the banks of the York River, they were pretty sure they'd find remnants of Werowocomoco, the legendary capital city chosen by Powhatan, the Algonquian paramount chief who once had the power to decide whether Jamestown's settlers should live or starve.

But once the archaeologists began scraping test pits every 50 feet, what they began to unearth was unlike anything they had seen in the region. About 1,000 feet from the river, where they expected to find nothing, they discovered a line of darkly stained dirt where newer topsoil had filled in what at one time had been a long, straight ditch.

The ditch was so straight, so perfectly constructed, they figured it must have been the work of colonists who moved into the area with their more sophisticated metal tools and axes once the Indians had moved out. But the team found only native artifacts. Then radiocarbon testing showed the ditch was built in the 13th century - 400 years before Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas' fateful encounter with John Smith.

The ditches, archaeologist Martin Gallivan theorizes, are monuments that separate the sacred part of the city, where Powhatan and his priests lived, from the profane, where everyone else went about their daily lives. These long-hidden ditches - Smith never wrote about them - are as important to understanding the Algonquian culture as the elaborate structures of the Inca or the white stone tributes to Jefferson and Lincoln on the Mall.

"There's no place like Werowocomoco," Gallivan said. For the Algonquians, it was the ancient center of the universe.

The discoveries counter impressions created by colonists such as Smith, who described the natives as "idle," "ignorant of the knowledge of gold" and "carelesse of any thing but from hand to mouth."

David Brown, another archaeologist with the Werowocomoco Research Group, said, "This really widens our perspective of how complex this society was and had been for a very long time."

This place, on the banks of Purtan Bay, lives in American legend. It was here that Smith was supposedly saved from certain death by a young and headstrong Pocahontas. It was called Werowocomoco - the place of the chief.

On a recent hot summer day, Gallivan, a College of William and Mary assistant professor, surveyed the land much as Powhatan might have as teams of archaeology students worked the soil.

Since he and other archaeologists began digging for six weeks each summer six years ago, they have found that Werowocomoco was huge by the standards of Tidewater Indian villages of the same era - about 40 acres. They found evidence, as they had expected, of busy village life near the riverbanks.

But the ditches are what capture their imagination. This year, they've uncovered roughly 700 feet. Some are parallel. Some curve away from the river.

In other Indian villages, ditches have been found around the outsides, remnants of defensive palisade walls, rather than right through the middle.

The archaeologists began analyzing their artifacts.

Near the river, they found cooking pots and vessels of every size and shape. But on the other side of the ditches, they found serving vessels and smaller bowls of the type used only by chiefs for feasts. They found ceramics that had originated throughout the Southeast, perhaps brought to chiefs as tribute or as gifts.

They came across postholes of the largest Indian house of this era found in the state, more than 70 feet long and 22 feet wide. It sits 600 paces from the river, exactly where Smith described Powhatan's house. And they found copper, prized by the Indians and hoarded by Powhatan, the composition of which matches copper scraps from Jamestown.

It all point to the ditches as monuments. "The landscape was intentionally structured to reflect the power of the place," Gallivan said, "and the importance of the people residing at that place."

Now, they're thinking that Powhatan, who was born farther inland and inherited only a handful of tribes, chose to make Werowocomoco his capital once he consolidated power over 30 tribes and became paramount chief.

"This shows that Powhatan was a remarkable politician," said Randy Turner, an archaeologist with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. "He was viewed as a godlike individual. And if our hypothesis is correct, he was using the sacred nature of this place to further validate his status not only as a political and military leader, but a spiritual and religious one."

The discoveries of an ancient and complex Indian past here are shedding new light on the events of 1607 and beyond. By 1609, after six increasingly tense visits by the English - once when they tried to crown Powhatan a vassal of King James and the last when Smith wanted to kidnap him and steal his food - Powhatan left Werowocomoco forever.

"That says something quite profound about the effect that the English were having on the native people," said David Silverman, a historian at George Washington University. "Now that we're finding that Werowocomoco had been the center of Powhatan Indian life for a very long time, it could not have been a lighthearted decision."