Recreation of Totero (Tutelo) dwelling, at Explore Park near Roanoke
Those bands of earliest Virginians traveled constantly from hunting camp to hunting camp, leaving behind a few archeological artifacts such as the flakes and "points" at Cactus Hill. After a short period of hunting, perhaps several days or weeks, the game in an area would be either harvested or wary. Easy-to-gather fruits and berries would have been picked as well. Then it was time to move on to another site, over a ridge into another valley where the hunting was easier and the natural resources could be harvested with less effort.
What makes a travelling band settle down for and entire season of the year in an established town, and then choose to stay in the same place year-round, rather than exhausting the local food sources (picking the berries and killing the wildlife used for food and furs/skins) and then crossing the ridge to hunt/gather in a new place?
First, let's assume that some hunting camps were revisited regularly because the hunting was good in that area. When camping, the natives would eat plants harvested from the area, or brought from the last camp. Seeds from plants that had been selected by the natives would be discarded in those hunting camps. (Ever eat every kernel in an ear of corn, or do you tend to leave a few on the cob when you throw it away?)
Some of those discarded seeds would grow the following year, eventually creating concentrations of the plants preferred by the natives. The seeds from the plants that were most attractive to humans were collected in the wild, and seeds with genes selected by humans were concentrated at the hunting camps. Ultimately, travelling bands of Paleo-Indians would discover that some of their hunting camps also became good food collecting sites.
A campsite that offered "easy pickings" for harvested the seeds or other desirable plant parts would be worth revisiting. Gradually some bands learned to invest some effort in helping the plants grow, and the fruits/seeds from that investment justified the humans living longer in the same place. This pattern of adopting agriculture may have occurred first in Meso-America, with one particular grass selected over and over again until its small seedhead evolved into ears of corn and the crop was adopted by tribes to the north and east.
In the Mississippi Valley and the Mid-Atlantic, agriculture stated with the domestication of squash, sunflowers, marshelder, and Chenopodium - a relative of the quinoa domesticated in South America. Corn was a late arrival, and may have become a common crop of Native Americans in Virginia only 600 years before the English arrived.
After the advent of agriculture 4-5,000 years ago in eastern North America, some Native American groups in Virginia settled down - but no large (10,000-person) population centers emerged to rival those in the Mississippi Valley or Mexico. Tribal communities in Virginia grew to be as large as several hundred people, as recorded by John Smith and others. Slash-and-burn agriculture required creating new fields for crops every three years or so. Settlements were not rigidly located in a particular spot. Native American towns "oozed" across the landscape as families moved their simple reed- or bark-covered huts to stay close to the particular spot of land where they were growing corn, beans, and squash (typically).