reconstruction of Native American palisade (protective barrier) at Monacan village in Natural Bridge
(if you grow crops... you need to defend your farm fields and protect your investment)
Generally in Virginia, the post-Archaic, pre-European phase from 1200BC to 1500AD is considered to be the Woodland Period. Pottery was invented (giving archeologists a clear basis for dating a site as "Woodland" rather than "Archaic"), agriculture gradually replaced more and more of the hunting and gathering practices, and the bow-and-arrow was invented and replaced the atl-atl ("throwing sticks").
We know little about these earliest Virginians, since they left no written records. Through archeology, we can discover that they preferred the same locations as later emigrants from Europe - river bottoms where crops could be grown on flat, fertile ground. Little evidence of their lifestyle has been protected from later disturbance in the fields that were plowed by late-arriving English, Scotch, and German settlers. Even isolated shelters in the mountains have been used by modern day hunters and hikers, disturbing the archeological evidence and contaminating sites with modern charcoal.
Nonetheless, we have enough evidence to describe three separate Virginia Woodland cultures that existed prior to the arrival of the English. These cultures were in different sections of the state, and varied in how they obtained food, created shelters, buried their dead, and made tools. They definitions are based on the professional judgement of modern archeologists, all of whom come from a different culture where concepts of "crime" and "god" and "authority" and "tool" and "food" are at least several thousand years, if not lightyears, away from the culture being described.
We don't have polls, surveys, or demographics for favorite TV shows in the Woodland Period, of course. Those cultural patterns that today separate us into different subcultures, like "soccer moms" and "young urban black professionals," are hard to distinguish for societies that developed 3,000 years ago and largely disappeared within 50 years of European contact. Still, with what we do know we divide Virginia into three Woodland Cultures that existed pre-European contact:
The Mississippian culture edged up the Tennessee drainage into Southwest Virginia, about 2,000 years ago.
In such a culture, religion evidently served to enhance the power of a chief who held office permanently, in contrast to centuries earlier when leadership or economic wealth was not strong enough to manufacture the distinctive mounds of the Mississippian culture. Southwest Virginia was at the edge of the Mississippian culture, however, and interpretation of the mounds is not definitive. For example, limestone fissures were used rather than the mounds to bury some of the dead. Some caves have the remains of 100 people, but modern visitors and vandals have disturbed almost every site. Our ability to interpret lifestyles 1,000 years ago is limited; your imagination is essential if you want to "get a feel" for lifestyles of that time.
Equally challenging is the interpretation of the symbols in a limestone cave, where someone about 1,000 years ago drew figures on the wall with their fingers. We know the charred remains of wood on the cave floor is 1,000 years ago, so we can date that site - but we understand less about those symbols that we do about the glyph chosen for the singer formerly known as Prince. One of the two examples of pictographs, paintings on rock walls drawn with iron oxide pigment, is Paintlick in Tazewell County.
Ely Mound is one of three mounds in Lee County that may have formed a city complex. It was excavated in the 1870's. At that time the mound still had the rotting cedar posts of what may have been a building used by tribal leaders of that area. Ely Mound is about as close to Monticello or Mount Vernon as you can get, for that now-vanished culture.
In 1492 Columbus set out to prove the earth was round, and ended up naming the natives in the New World "Indians" based on his mistaken belief that he'd reached Asia. (The English knew what they were doing, when they named the region after the "virgin" Queen Elizabeth, the main river and the initial settlement after King James, and the second capital after King William - the other half of "William and Mary.")
Around the time of Columbus, the residents of what would become Tazewell County build a palisade around the town at Crab Orchard. The palisade was a series of tall poles stuck in the ground, one next to the other, to either keep enemies out or animals in. Inside the palisade were houses made on saplings and covered with bark and/or skins, storage pits for food, and burial pits. A gate house would sometimes be built to guard the entrance through the palisade.
The Earthen Mound Burial Culture was located in a different region, the Shenandoah Valley and the Piedmont. Tools were made from local materials - quartz in the Piedmont, chert/jasper in the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge. The distinctive burial mounds, now largely removed through plowing and floods, held the remains of hundreds of Virginians, including the bones of many that were ritually reburied there. The mounds grew larger over time, as more and more people were buried in them, comparable to the Hopewell culture burial mounds.
One of these mounds was excavated by Thomas Jefferson in 1784, along the Rivanna River. This was after he had retired as Governor of Virginia, the Revolutionary War was over (Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown in 1781), and he was living the life of a country gentleman and being "scientific." Jefferson claimed he actually saw some Indians in Albemarle County walk directly to a similar mound, pause to express sorrow, and then move on to their next destination. As he described the excavation, the mound was
He dug perpendicular into the "barrow" and found bones on the bottom. It was covered by a layer of stones brought from a cliff a quarter-mile away, covered by more earth, more bones, etc. in three separate strata. He estimated 1,000 skeletons were in that one mound. At the same time, he estimated the population of living Indians in Virginia included just 3-4 male Mattaponi "and they have more negro than Indian blood in them," 10-12 Pamunkies, and not a male left among the Nottaways
The earliest English settlers may have met two tribes that represented this Earthen Mound Burial Culture - the Manahoacs at the Falls of the Rappahannock, and the Monacans at the Falls of the James. They spoke languages based on a Siouan rootstock, rather than the Iroquoian languages south of the James River or the Algonquian languages of the coastal tribes.
By the time the English settlers moved inland across the Fall Line, into the Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley, the impact of disease had dramatically reduced the population of the inland tribes. With the exception of Jeffersons report, and negative assessments by the settlers crossing into their territory and planting their own crops in the openings in the woods created by the Indians, there is little about their lifestyles in the historical record.
In contrast, we have many reports about the natives who greeted the English in Tidewater. The Coastal Plain Culture was characterized by saltwater food resources, in contrast to the Indians above the Fall Line and in far Southwest Virginia. Shellfish like oysters, anadramous fish like the sturgeon and shad and striped bass, plus crabs provided reliable food resources and enabled towns to develop all along Tidewater rivers and creeks. Instead of burial mounds, the Coastal Plain culture created middens of oyster shells.
The lack of stone along the coast caused the Coastal Plain culture to rely more heavily upon tools made from bone, shells, and wood. However, trading patterns throughout North America brought copper all the way from the Great Lakes area, as well as corn, squash, and beans up from Mexico. Trading for stone tools from the Fall Line would not have been a challenge for the earliest Virginians.
Politics and cultural patterns of the coastal plain Indians are known best, including some reports from the Spanish adventurers who sailed to Virginia in 1525, long before the English. Apparently the Europeans arrived about the time a political shift occurred. Unlike the Indians further inland, along the Coastal Plain a hierarchy of political and military power developed. Small, militarily weak tribes had to submit to dominant tribes, paying heavy tribute in exchange for peace and a measure of independence.
The towns of the Coastal Plain Culture were drawn by early European artists, so we have more than archeological stains in the dirt to deal with. The lodges were oval, covered with bark, and wouldn't pass today as even minimum quality housing. No running water, no indoor toilets, no phones, no cable TV - it was a different environment, and even the modern recreations are hard to get exactly right because the maintenance of the raw materials is time-consuming. Some were fortified towns surrounded by wooden palisades for protection, just as the Roanoke Colony sought to protect itself, as noted on the White-De Bry Map of Virginia (1590)
The burial rituals of the natives were quite different than those we use in Virginia today. Sometimes they were buried in pits, but in other cases the dead were first left on high platforms where the flesh decomposed, or was eaten by birds and other animals. Then the bones were buried in pits (rather than mounds to the west). The bodies of the chiefs were treated differently. They were mummified and kept in lodges known as "quioccasans."
Today, in the suburban sprawl west of Richmond in Henrico County, you may discover yourself driving on a road called Quioccasin. On Colonial golf course in Williamsburg, you'll see other evidence of prehistoric Virginia that was preserved when the golf course was built: