Projectile points found at Mount Pleasant.

By the time the first English settlers arrived at Jamestown in May 1607, Native Americans had been living in what is now Surry County for thousands of years. The Quiyoughcohannocks, the local Algonquian Indians encountered by John Smith and his fellow colonists soon after their arrival, were the distant descendants of hunter-gatherer groups who had roamed Virginia’s Southside since the last Ice Age. Virginia’s first inhabitants, the Paleo-Indians, arrived in this region around 9,500 B.C. At that time, Virginia’s climate was significantly cooler and wetter, and, with the glaciers still receding, sea level lay more than 180 feet below what it is today. The Paleo-Indians lived in mobile bands and hunted large game animals, including mammoth, mastodon, deer, and elk over a wide, but defined territory. The distinctive material culture of these peoples included fluted projectile points crafted primarily from relatively scarce cherts and jaspers. Though Paleo-Indians may well have occupied the vicinity of Mount Pleasant in the course of their annual movements through the region, the probability of finding archaeological evidence from this era is slight.

As the glaciers continued to melt, sea levels rose rapidly throughout the Mid-Atlantic region between about 8,000 and 3,000 B.C., dramatically altering the physical and natural environment. During this period, Paleo-Indians were gradually replaced by larger populations, known to archaeologists as the Archaic peoples. Based on archaeological evidence, researchers speculate that Archaic hunter-gatherers, like their Paleo-Indian predecessors, moved continually throughout the region, occupying large, multi-family base camps during certain times of the year, and dispersing into smaller groups to make use of natural resources as they became available. The typical Archaic toolkit included a number of new, more specialized implements, including adzes, notched axes, and grinding tools, suggesting an increasing reliance on plant materials and foods. By the end of the period, it appears that Archaic peoples were becoming more sedentary, with a resulting growth in population and better definition of group territories.

The recent comprehensive archaeological survey of Mount Pleasant has discovered extensive Archaic occupation in the south field, while an especially artifact-rich Archaic period site has been identified in the small upriver field.

Archaeological plan and rendition of a Late Woodland long house from Paspahegh, James City County.

By about 1,200 B.C., the lifeways of native peoples along the James River and throughout Virginia’s Coastal Plain were beginning to change in profound ways. This new era, defined by scholars as the Woodland period, witnessed a gradual transition from seasonal hunting and gathering to a more sedentary form of existence, with an increasingly complex social structure and an economy based primarily on agriculture. One of the most obvious material culture developments characteristic of the Woodland period was the introduction of pottery.

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries marked the height of the Late Woodland period in Virginia, an era characterized by a highly sophisticated economic and social structure, with diverse cultural traditions and large-scale interaction between different groups. This period, which roughly spanned the years 800-1607 A.D., saw the emergence of large villages occupied throughout the year, with resident populations that often numbered into the hundreds. These large groups were sustained by domesticated plant foods such as maize, beans, and squash, and supplemented by fish, shellfish, game, and wild plants.

More is known about Woodland sites than those of any earlier period. Most were located within estuarine or riverine settings, and ranged from villages and hamlets to small seasonal camps and resource procurement stations. Many of the largest sites were occupied for relatively long periods of time. Due to changes in subsistence economies and technologies, sites of this period often left tangible archaeological evidence such as postmolds associated with longhouse structures and defensive palisades, cooking and trash pits, hearths, and individual and multiple ossuary burials. While some villages were characterized by densely clustered residences, others were more dispersed in plan, with houses separated by agricultural fields.

When John Smith arrived in Virginia in 1607, he and his fellow English settlers unwittingly stumbled into the midst of the Powhatan chiefdom, one of the most complex Native American groups on the eastern seaboard. The paramount leader Powhatan commanded the allegiance of local chiefs, or “weroances,” in thirty-one different districts, including a total population of approximately 13,000. In the early seventeenth century, the various Indian groups living on the south shore of the James River had only recently been brought under Powhatan’s dominion.