STEVEN WALL
RIGHTING HISTORY
Following in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson, Jeffrey Hantman’s excavation of a Monacan Indian village is setting the historical record straight. BY CHERYL PELLERIN
C
aptain John Smith and 104 of his fellow British colonists established the first permanent North American settlement at Jamestown in Virginia’s Tidewater region. History books invariably describe the Jamestown colonists as having initiated the first representative government in North America, imported the first slaves, and built the first Anglican church. There’s less information about how, in the late 16th century, at least two other groups— one English, one Spanish—tried, and failed, to establish colonies in the Tidewater area. Given the rocky history of European intrusion in that region, many archaeologists and historians find the Jamestown colonists’ tolerant reception by Powhatan, chief of the Powhatan Indians of Tidewater, somewhat strange. Now, nearly 400 years later, the archaeological record has american archaeology
become a rich source of information on Virginia’s earliest years and much of America’s European past. The original Jamestown settlement, once thought lost to the James River, was identified in 1994. Last year, archaeologist Jeffrey Hantman and his 20student crew spent most of the summer excavating units at an Indian village site on the Rivanna River just north of Charlottesville, Virginia. Hantman is an associate professor of anthropology and director of the archaeology program at the University of Virginia. His research interests include identifying the responses of indigenous people—particularly the Monacan and Powhatan cultures of Virginia—to colonialism. The village site is a pasture in the floodplain of the Rivanna River. 29
