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 would find remnants of Werowocomoco, the legendary capital city chosen by Powhatan, the Algonquian paramount chief who once had the power to decide whether the settlers at Jamestown should live or starve.
But what the archaeologists 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 found 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 that 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, separating the sacred part of the city, where Powhatan and his priests lived, from the profane, where everyone else went about the business of daily life. These long-hidden ditches – Smith never mentioned them in his writings – 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 National Mall.
“There’s no place like Werowocomoco,” said Gallivan, a College of William and Mary assistant professor. For the Algonquians, for centuries the dominant tribe of Virginia’s Tidewater region, it was the ancient center of the universe.
The discoveries at this site have provided a counter to 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.”
“Historians tend to portray Virginia Indians as a static, unchanging culture,” said David Brown, another archaeologist with the Werowocomoco Research Group. “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 in Gloucester County, lives in American legend. It was here that a captured Smith was supposedly saved from certain death by a young and headstrong Pocahontas. It was called Werowocomoco – the place of the chief.
Now, researchers are thinking that Powhatan, who was born farther inland and inherited only a handful of tribes, most likely 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 and a member of the research group. “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.”
