James River Chiefdoms
Subtitle: The Rise of Social Inequality in the Chesapeake (Our Sustainable Future)
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: November 1, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 295
ISBN-13: 9780803221864
Subjects: Indigenous peoples; North American archaeology; Kings and rulers; Ethnic Issues; United States - Colonial Period; Antiquities; Business & Economics; Industries - Agribusiness; Business/Economics; North America; USA; Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies; Anthropology - General; Social Science / Native American Studies; Powhatan Indians; Agriculture - Animal Husbandry; Excavations (Archaeology); First contact with Europeans
Description: "James River Chiefdoms explores puzzling discrepancies between the ethnohistoric and archaeological records of the Powhatan and Monacan societies Jamestown colonists met in 1607. The colonists described the coastal Powhatans and the Monacans of the James River interior in terms that evoke the anthropological notion of a chiefdom, but the Chesapeake region's archaeological record lacks elements typically associated with complex polities." "In an effort to account for these apparent incongruities, Martin D. Gallivan synthesizes ethnohistoric accounts with the archaeology of thirty-five Native settlements dating from A.D. 1-1610 to identify and illuminate social changes largely undetected by previous research. A comparative, quantitative analysis of residential archaeology in the James River Valley highlights a rearrangement of daily practices within Native villages between 1200 and 1500. James River villagers reorganized their domestic production, settlements, and regional interactions to create new funds of power within social settings perched between communally oriented cultural practices and exclusionary political strategies. During the early-seventeenth-century colonial encounter, Native leaders were thus positioned to employ strategies that, for a time, eclipsed communal decision-making structures in the Chesapeake."--Jacket.