Chesapeake Colonial History

On behalf of the Department of the Navy, Naval District Washington, Louis Berger recently conducted investigations of two Colonial era sites at St. Inigoes, in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. One site, the Old Chapel Field (18ST330), was part of the Jesuit core of the plantation in the early eighteenth century. The other site, Antenna Field Site (18ST386), dates to the late seventeenth century and is associated with a tenant occupation. Domestic middens were identified at both sites, revealing rich information on material culture and diet at the plantation.

This study situates the colonization of Virginia, the centrepiece of early English overseas settlement activity, in the social and political landscape of the early seventeenth century. Roper explores how the early development of the colony was viewed from both sides of the Atlantic, using the documentary record of key figures in the Virginia Company, as well as the colonizers themselves. He paints a vivid picture of a political culture characterized by patronage, the pursuit of personal agendas and fierce grappling for factional advantage, as ‘Old World’ political behaviour was successfully transplanted to the colony. At the same time however, he shows how local concerns and identity competed with the Stuart monarchy’s attempts to centralize state affairs on the other side of the Atlantic.

Roper rejects the prevailing view of the early colonisers, the Virginia Company and Crown ministers as bumbling incompetents whose mismanagement nearly caused the failure of the Jamestown project. Rather, he argues, they had a clear sense of purpose for the colony, and successfully adapted and crafted inherited political systems to a very new situation.

An examination into the lives of Joseph, William, and John Smith broadens our understanding of the colonial Chesapeake while deepening our knowledge of Gypsy history. Doing so allows Gypsies to be written into the historical narrative as discrete actors, rather than mythologized into a timeless landscape. It also provides a fuller picture of the population living in the late colonial Chesapeake. Though sources about these men are scant, contextualizing their experiences reveals their lives and decisions as convict servants to have been fairly typical for the time and place. However, a deeper reading of their runaway advertisement suggests that the local population must have had plenty of experience with either real or imagined Gypsies to have created their own assumptions of what it meant to be Gypsy.

Located in the eastern end of the seventeenth-century capital townsite, Structure 24 was one of the first buildings unearthed in the 1930s during the first government-sponsored archaeological investigations in the former Virginia capital. The building was poorly recorded with even its exact location left uncertain. Following the 1950s discovery of an early seventeenth-century well and associated refuse pit near the presumed location of Structure 24, this enigmatic building was posited with these features as being part of an early domestic complex. Historical research carried out in the 1990s during the Jamestown Archaeological Assessment identified the first occupants of the lot surrounding the presumed location of Structure 24 as the family of a gunsmith named John Jackson, a Jamestown resident in the 1610s and 1620s.

Following two summer field seasons, the research excavations at Structure 24 yielded the outlines of a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot dwelling which can clearly be associated with the occupancy of the Jackson family. Employing a non-invasive, preservationist excavation strategy, careful analysis of plowzone soils and artifacts allowed for this attribution without the further destruction of the ephemeral traces of a very important early Jamestown site.

In addition to broadening our understanding of the nature of life in the first years of Jamestown’s New Towne, as well as our understanding of the lifestyle enjoyed by the few craftspeople who actually settled in the town, the Structure 24 excavation stands as a model for future work in the townsite and at other archaeological sites which are not under threat from development.

A Phase I archaeological survey was conducted within western Talbot County, Maryland within the Bay Hundred District. The survey was funded by the Maryland Historical Trust and Preservation Maryland. Matching funds and support was provided by the Bay Hundred Foundation, the Chesapeake Watershed Archaeological Research Foundation, Talbot County, and the Smithsonian Institution. The survey included a shoreline survey component, which examined almost 100 linear miles of coastline. The survey included a tilled field component, which examined approximately 98 acres of tilled field. The project documented data on twenty-six archaeological sites that span the region’s 13,000 years of prehistory up to the early 20th century. Twenty-one of the sites had not been previously recorded. The survey included a public education component that included public lectures and involved volunteers and students with the field surveys, site mapping, and local geology.

This thesis explores the interaction of numerous factors affecting economic productivity in England’s 17th-century tobacco trade with its Chesapeake colonies, particularly with an eye to transatlantic shipping. This is achieved here through the use of a network inspired analytical framework to provide an assessment of a range of elements surrounding the trade over the course of the 17th century, how these elements interacted, and the degree to which they affected the overall productivity tobacco market. Data used to these means include the extant body of relevant literature, historical documentation, archaeological data, and a case study of an archaeological site near St. Mary’s City, Maryland, USA investigated for the purpose of this thesis.
The tobacco economy is examined and analysed based on various inputs, along with various social and political factors. Settlement patterning is studied through geo-spatial archaeological data from Maryland to identify possible causes for the shift in the tobacco collection model from a plantation-front based system to a central warehouse model. Through this, it is argued that the dominant driver for this change was a spread of plantations to more inland sites owing to population growth as the dominant cause. Shipbuilding is scrutinised to identify trends in ship technology and construction methods, showing changes to be both purpose and resource driven. Passenger journals and logbooks are used to examine changes in sailing route throughout the 17th century from England to the Chesapeake, resulting in the identification of a previously unknown route of ocean passage in common usage in the latter half of the 17th century. This change provided generally faster crossings on a less hazardous route, necessitated largely by political and social causes. Making use of these same voyage accounts as a data source, a quantitative study of English merchant ship performance in terms of velocity made good and windward sailing capabilities is provided. Results of this study indicate that advances in ocean crossing times were largely route dependent, with little if any advance in sailing speed over this period. Lastly, the examination of a submerged ballast cluster has provided insights into possible focusses of maritime archaeology in the Chesapeake region. To date, no vessels dating to the early colonial period have been located in the region despite heavy maritime traffic in this era. Ballast discard sites dating to this period are a common yet virtually unexamined site type for this area, and should be afforded additional attention. 
In sum, this thesis provides a detailed overview of the function of the English-Chesapeake tobacco trade, resulting in a series of network-based models of interaction examining foreign and domestic politics, crew size and mariner wages, tobacco production, the tobacco market, product collection models, sailing routes, hull and sail efficiency, ship construction, time spent at sea, and time spent in port. These are assessed on a temporal scale, allowing for summary of the function of the tobacco economy at various points throughout the 17th century and into the 18th century.

Pierced and bent coins, quartz crystals and other stones, metal objects, religious artifacts, beads, and mirrors are a few examples of objects used in European, African, and Native American cultural expressions. Associating objects with a particular ethnicity without disentangling the overlapping cultural contexts in which Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans lived would fall short of understanding the full range of meanings associated with those objects. Cultural interaction and conflict among these groups influenced the material expression of spiritual beliefs in the Chesapeake region during the 17th century. Numerous artifacts, recovered from two adjacent sites in Prince George’s County, Maryland, dating from 1680 to 1720, have been pierced or intentionally buried within buildings. The role of intentionality and the interaction among Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans are examined as key components for interpreting expressions of spiritual beliefs in the colonial Chesapeake region.

The following summary outlines the coastal geological and historical data which was put forth in 2002.  The report also outlines the saga that unfolded after the discovery of a metal cross at 44NH494 in June 2010.  The report illustrates the compounding errors that can result from an attempt to document the archaeology of a single day.  In this updated version, the Smithsonian XRF report and the historical data have been included as appendixes.

A Phase I archaeological survey was conducted on the Kingston Landing property owned by Talbot County. The survey conformed to the Standards and Guidelines for Archaeological Investigations in Maryland (Shaffer and Cole 1994). The Phase I survey consisted of background research, an analysis of associated artifact collections, the excavation of two one-by-one meter test units, an investigation of the soils and stratigraphy via five auger holes, and an analysis of the sediments by a soil scientist. The Phase I work was mandated by the County’s proposed construction of a new parking area, boat ramp and launching pier along with the stabilization of the shoreline. In the area associated with the construction of the new boat ramp and launching pier no significant archaeological remains were discovered. Along the eastern margins of the property no significant remains were located. However, along the western margins of the property, we located the intact archaeological remains of a late 17th and a 18th century landing. The late 17th and 18th century landing consisted of exposures of gunflint nodules used as ballast and large chunks of coral ballast along with diagnostic artifacts. Given the intact nature of the archaeological deposits associated with the late 17th and 18th century landing, this portion of the property would be eligible for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. Considering that the County proposes to extend the boundary of the current parking lot towards the west and establish erosion protection along this section of shoreline, we recommend that the county avoid any excavations in excess of twenty-two centimeters or nine inches along the western section of the Kingston Landing property in the performance of the parking lot expansion and shoreline protection. In the area slated for the proposed new boat ramp and launching pier, we can thoroughly document that no significant archaeological remains will be impacted. There are also no significant archaeological remains along the shoreline associated with the eastern margins of the property. As such, there are no archaeological concerns north and east of the current launch area and the proposed upgrades to these sections of the property can be approved. The fieldwork, artifact collection analysis, background research, and the pedological/geomorphological summaries presented in this report should address any archaeological questions associated with the Kingston Landing property. A photographic documentation summary and mapping overview of 18TA302 are also presented in Appendix II of this report, which provides detailed information about the late 19th century landing feature associated with the Kingston Landing parcel.

Objects of bodily adornment played an important role within Chesapeake Algonquian sociopolitical
systems during the Late Woodland and early colonial periods (A.D. 900-1680). Recent scholarship has
provided valuable insight into the circulation of copper throughout the broader region (Lattanzi 2007,
2008), however, little is known about shell bead production and exchange despite the recovery of these
objects in significant numbers from archaeological sites in all provinces of Maryland, Virginia, and North
Carolina. This paper presents the results of a study aimed at assessing the viability of laser ablation
inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) for identifying shell bead production
locales throughout the southern Middle Atlantic. The central goal of the study is to identify unique
geochemical signatures keyed to individual tidal river systems and determine whether beads of
Mercenaria mercenaria (hard clam), retain elemental compositions that can be faithfully linked to their
waterway of origin.

Trade in goods, and the exchange of information and ideas that resulted, was the backbone and lifeblood of early colonial life in the Chesapeake colonies. Clay tobacco pipes are one of the most tangible pieces of evidence of these relationships. Clay pipes comprised almost a quarter of the artifact assemblage at the John Hallowes site (44WM6) in Westmoreland County, Virginia, a fortified house that was occupied from 1647-1681. This article will explore the multiple trade and exchange networks in which the residents of the Hallowes site were engaged using locally-made and imported clay tobacco pipes to understand interactions that occurred at the local, regional, cross-cultural, trans-Atlantic, and trans-national levels.

Stratford Hall Plantation’s Oval Site was once a dynamic 18th-century farm quarter that was home to an enslaved community and overseer charged with growing Virginia’s cash crop: tobacco. No documentary evidence references the site, leaving archaeology as the only means to reconstruct the lives of the site’s inhabitants. This research uses the results of a macrobotanical analysis conducted on soil samples taken from an overseer’s basement and a dual purpose slave quarter/kitchen cellar at the Oval Site to understand what the site’s residents were eating and how the acquisition, production, processing, provisioning, and consumption of food impacted their daily lives. The interactive nature of the overseer, enslaved community, and their respective botanical assemblages suggests that food was not only used as sustenance, it was also a medium for social interaction and mutual dependence between the two groups.

The botanical assemblage is also utilized to discuss how the consumption of provisioned, gathered, and produced foods illustrate the ways that Stratford’s enslaved inhabitants formed communities and exerted agency through food choice. A mixture of  traditional African, European, and native/wild taxa were recovered from the site, revealing the varied cultural influences that affected the resident’s cuisine. The assemblage provides evidence for ways that the site’s enslaved Africans and African Americans adapted to the local environment, asserted individual and group food preferences, and created creolized African American identities as they sought to survive and persist in the oppressive plantation landscape.

The results from the Oval Site are compared to nine other 18th- and 19th-century plantation sites in Virginia to demonstrate how food was part of the cultural creolization process undergone by enslaved Africans and African Americans across the region.  The comparison further shows that diverse, creolized food preferences developed by enslaved communities can be placed into a regional framework of foodways patterns. Analyzing the results on a regional scale acknowledges the influence of individual preferences and identities of different communities on their food choices, while still demonstrating how food was consistently both a mechanism and a product of African American community formation.

Trade played a crucial role in the relationships that formed between European colonists and Native Americans during the early colonial period. In the 17th-century Potomac River valley the interactions between Native Americans and Europeans laid the foundations for the emergence of a truly creolized society. Much of the research on these relationships has focused on Maryland contexts and post-1660 contexts on Virginia’s Northern Neck. This paper examines the influence of Native Americans on the early settlement of Virginia’s Potomac Valley using the Hallowes site (44MW6) as an example. Skeletal-portion and age-distribution analyses of the deer remains at the site and a rich historical context are used to indicate trading relationships that existed between the residents of the site and local Native Americans. Through this trade, and the interaction it facilitated, people like John Hallowes participated in the increasingly complex intercultural relationships that defined the early Chesapeake.

Though many scholars have referenced Joan Scott as the earliest Gypsy in North America, thanks to a 1695 Henrico County Virginia court record identifying her as "an Egiptian and noe Xtian woman," none have explored her life further. Despite this, an examination of the fornication charge against Scott suggests much about her life. Scott entered the colony twenty years before her fornication charge and while unmarried bore a child whose father the court considered a man of color. In these ways, Scott's life appears similar to her contemporaries. Yet, in other ways Scott's experience differed. By allowing the court to believe in her Gypsy identity and non-Christian religion she worked the court in her favor and saw her case dismissed. When historicized and contextualized, the meager details known about Joan Scott enhance our understanding of the colonial American Gypsy experience and contribute to a broader American historical narrative.

Landscapes, which include islands, adjoining Chesapeake Bay have come and gone over the past three centuries.  Most of these islands once contained a vast archaeological record.  Discounting sea level rise, researchers and historians have largely failed to recognize how coastal erosion and land loss in the Chesapeake region have influenced our understanding of the past.  The goal of this short treatise is to provide some perspective on islands that have disappeared and offer a detailed record of Sharps Island.  Another goal is to provide a summary of how the geomorphology and geology of various islands help us to better understand how erosion has influenced the bay’s ecology, biology, and geology.  Pure bathymetric-sea level reconstruction models fail to compensate for erosion.  As a natural force, coastal erosion is an overriding variable when sea level is stable or rising very slowly.  Most importantly, the legacy of Sharps Island has provided us with a better understand of the complexities and interrelated factors associated with coastal erosion.  Finally, the synopsis serves to correct some egregious errors made by historians and researchers in the recent past about the historic record and the geologic meaning of what actually occurred at Sharps Island between 1631 and 1954.  In sum, the island’s legacy offers a perspective for both the past and the future of coastal landscapes in similar shoreline settings.

This essay explores how an evolutionary perspective can help historical archaeologists use archaeological evidence to further our understanding of historical dynamics associated with the global demographic expansions of Europeans and Africans that began in the late fifteenth century. It sketches evolutionary models for some of the economic and social strategies of free and enslaved people that created a slave society in the Chesapeake region in the seventeenth century and conditioned its historical trajectory up to the Civil War. Those strategies informed the choices made by Thomas Jefferson as he developed Monticello Plantation around 1770. Evolutionary models offer tools to unravel the historical significance of subsequent change in slave and elite housing, slave settlement patterns, and agricultural ecology, documented in the archaeological record at Monticello and the region.

Catholic devotional objects are rare but persistent finds at archaeological sites in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. These largely personal, private objects—from medals depicting saints to rosaries and reliquaries—illustrate the vibrant spiritual world inhabited by residents of the seventeenth- through twentieth-century Middle Atlantic region. Contextual analysis of undisturbed artifacts reveals that they were treated with reverence, although not always in ways reflecting orthodox Catholicism. Moreover, analysis shows that the social context of their use among people of European, African, and Native American descent was unmistakably different. These objects of metal, wood, bone, clay, glass, and stone played pivotal roles in the way that American Catholics connected with the supernatural. Through sacramental objects, the archaeological record is populated with angels, saints, and materials used to connect with Christ and the Virgin Mary. In particular, the materials from which these objects were made—and not simply their symbolism—gave them power. Considering relationships among humans, sacramental objects, and supernatural powers provides new opportunities to interpret how these objects were used and, ultimately, how and why they ended up in the ground.

Unlike many goods in the eighteenth century, which were wholly imported, utilitarian coarse earthenwares were also produced locally within the American colonies. In the Chesapeake region, it has been suggested that these local wares were primarily reserved for those unable to directly participate in the transatlantic credit economy fostered by the tobacco consignment system. Rather than relying on ambiguous visual attributes to identify these wares, this study utilized elemental analysis via LA-ICP-MS. Coarse earthenwares from domestic plantation contexts of varying social status were assigned to production zones based on shared elemental composition with a reference dataset. This reference dataset incorporated sherds from historic earthenware production sites across the mid-Atlantic and in Great Britain, representing 12 geologically distinct production zones. The results emphasize the diversity of coarse earthenware sources that Chesapeake residents accessed, both local and imported. There was a steady decrease in the use of imported wares in favor of domestically made products over time. There were no sharp differences among plantation households of different statuses, suggesting that these everyday wares were equally accessible to all, perhaps via plantation provisioning strategies. The omnipresence of local wares is evidence for the pragmatic and political strengths of local production.

Ignorance is undeniably ever present in the act of knowledge generation and the published continuity of academic traditions. Ignorance and fact are woven together in cultural historical narratives to provide readers with societal " truths, " which are comforting. Most modern anthropologists would recognize that ignorance is a significant aspect of any academic publication in two ways. First, can we really quantify everything we don't know which applies to the narrative our published work is supposed to entail versus the sources we have cited? Second, how does our preference for our own societal norms via selecting comfortable accepted secondary sources contradict the generation of knowledge by framing our narrative in a manner inconsistent with the reality the primary historical data presents us with? In other words, how can we gain awareness of our own subjectivity and use that awareness to create a more objective narrative? In the field of maritime archaeology for the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, no one vessel type has been subject to the generation and continuity of published ignorance more than that of the logboat. To understand this, we must take a step back and start a narrative with influence in the Annales school of thought. Let us start our narrative at the beginning with the work of M. V. Brewington, heavily cited in our current literature. " After 1590 when the drawings of John White had made at Raleigh's Roanoke settlement were published, Englishmen were familiar with the dugout canoes the southern Indians built. The colonists were quick to adopt these canoes, so great was their need for watercraft which could not be otherwise obtained. The white man's superior knowledge of small craft soon indicated changes which would improve the canoe: sharp ends would make her easier to propel and more seaworthy; broader beam and a keel would increase stability: sail would lessen the work of getting from place to place. " From an anthropological perspective, the above quote which is often cited regarding logboats, is problematic for the Chesapeake. It is riddled with the causal yet persistent racism directed at the First Nations of North America that was part of our populist cultural historical narrative well into the 1970s. In addition, M. V. Brewington, clearly race biased in the above quote, also fails to examine cause and effect outside of a white British colonial perspective in any of his works. He fails to investigate deeper and move past his own British colonial cultural historicism. He assigns technological development to a specific race, without taking into account the fact that cultural continuity has nothing to do with ethnicity, just as technology use has no strict correlation with ethnicity.

Edward Rhodes was a seventeenth-century sailor involved in the English-Chesapeake tobacco trade. From 1670-1676, he kept a book describing his journeys back and forth across the Atlantic in four di erent ships, keeping information on daily positions and weather, functional aspects of trade, deaths aboard the ship, and other relevant information. Daily position is described with latitude and a relative longitude, showing a very early and curious attempt at lateral navigation. is record is used to examine many of the unknown maritime aspects of the early English tobacco trade including mapping routes and clarifying some functional aspects of shipping this commodity.

This paper explores colonial English epistemologies of weather and climate through an analysis of the dwelling spaces of the 17th-century Chesapeake region. Using Ingold’s notion of the “weather-world,” I consider early modern perceptions of air, temperature, and the body in order to address the various ways in which colonial landscapes were defined and shaped. Employing an analytical method known as buildings information modeling (BIM), I investigate the implications of 17th-century pit-house construction in an attempt to understand the ways in which individuals engage with an environment, constructing and dwelling through a particular way of knowing the world. This analysis ultimately demonstrates how archaeological evidence speaks to the material ways in which people manipulate their experience of place, not only to experience their surroundings, but to shape them to fit the epistemological context that creates a knowledge of place.

Children are an understudied group of people historically, especially in archaeology. Where children have been studied, it is typically in relation to mortality rates. This paper describes some of the findings from a year-long study of the construction of African and European childhood in the Virginia and Maryland colonies through an archaeological lens. Analyses of probate inventories and child burials shed important light on the experience of childhood in the colonial Chesapeake. In addition to providing an archaeological examination of childhood mortality, the study of child bodies in burials can reflect attitudes towards these children. Material culture in combination with burial conditions of children indicates the emotional value these children had, complicating the notion that children were valued primarily for their economic contributions.

Two 17th-century tobacco pipe fragments have been identified from two sites in Westmoreland County, Virginia that appear to combine decorative traditions from two, perhaps three, different groups living in the area at the time: Native Virginians, English colonists, and possibly enslaved Africans.

On 20 February 1637/38, the Virginia House of Burgesses, ‘called by his Majesty's appointment’, convened to consider five ‘Propositions’ offered by Charles 1 for the reformation of their colony's tobacco trade. An investigation into the career and context of this ‘Assembly’ better informs us of the character of that monarch's government and, correspondingly, on English ‘state formation’ and empire in the first half of the seventeenth century. We learn that, as in its three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the Crown and its officers experienced little joy in their efforts to clear the lines of authority connecting Whitehall with the rest of the king's domains.

This chapter draws on the results of several larger collections-based research projects conducted in the Potomac River Valley, beginning in 2008. Reanalysis of these collections provides an opportunity to apply modern analytical techniques and interpretive frameworks to older collections. While many of these collections reflect knowledge accumulated by 17th-century material culture scholars over the past 40 years, recataloging (or cataloging for the first time) leads to more accurate identification of artifacts and refinement of site dates. In some cases, these refined dates can drastically change the interpretations. Reexamination of these sites, individually and as a group, allows them to be situated in contemporary historic and interpretive frameworks that did not exist when the sites were first excavated. By examining the sites at multiple scales and crafting detailed historical contexts, the authors are able to relate artifacts, kinship networks, and site structures on a local level to broader regional and Atlantic concepts of politics and authority.

Scholars working in the early Chesapeake have the unusual opportunity to study the formation of communities established over relatively short periods of time, and to trace the ways in which the material world shaped their creation, maintenance, alteration and dissolution.  I focus on the early historic community of Chicacoan, located on the Virginia shore of the Potomac River. The interests of individuals, the profitability of native furs, and the cultural landscape of the Potomac River together led to the establishment of this place at this time. The archaeological remains of architecture at the site of Chicacoan's leading citizen, John Mottrom, suggest that he used the built environment in conversation with contemporaries across the Potomac, much as his acquaintance John Hallowes had done at his home at Appamattucks, further to the west.

This document contains photographs of the entirety of a 17th century sailor's personal logbook, recounting six round-trip merchant voyages from London to the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia. The original book is housed in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, MS. Rawl d. 702, and was photographed with permission in 2012. This rare document provides detailed information on daily sailing and weather conditions, early navigation including calculations of longitude, and contains enough detail to plot the voyages and calculate vessel performance.

Trade in goods, and the exchange of information and ideas that resulted, was the backbone and lifeblood of the Chesapeake colonies. Through these formal and informal interactions colonists formed personal and community relationships that defined many aspects of life in 17th-century Virginia and Maryland. Marked or decorated imported clay tobacco pipes and locally-produced mold-made tobacco pipes are one of the most tangible pieces of evidence of these relationships and are the main focus of this study. By combining archaeological and documentary records, the multiple interaction spheres in which residents from 16 archaeological sites in the Potomac River Valley were engaged from 1630 to 1730 are studied to examine the impacts of politics and conflict on trade and exchange. The overarching questions that guide this study of local and trans-oceanic trade are: How did colonists on the periphery use material culture to negotiate their new place within the early modern world, their integration within the Atlantic World, their participation in the emerging capitalist world-system, and ultimately, how did their actions on the periphery help shape the formation of an 18th-century British-Atlantic identity? The formation of social networks based on the trade of goods and the exchange of information at the local, regional, trans-Atlantic, trans-ethnic, and trans-national levels helped Chesapeake settlers establish a new colonial society; a society with foundations not only rooted in English culture, laws, and mores, but one that was also heavily influenced by interactions with new groups of people. While the colonists encountered many different groups of people, all of whom contributed to the formation of this new society, I specifically trace Anglo-Dutch interactions and discuss the influence of political and economic ideologies from the Netherlands on Chesapeake culture. The creolization process was not the same for everyone, and the adoption of a multiscalar, micro-historical approach allows for a discussion of  trade at the household, community, regional, and Atlantic levels and determine why individuals chose to interact with specific people or groups. These differences speak to agency and consumer choice, rather than pure economic or geographic constraints.

The article briefly outlines the condition of archaeological sites along the shorelines of the Chesapeake Bay.  It also highlights some of the results of the 2015 to 2016 coastal shoreline survey of both Accomack and Northampton counties in Virginia.

As an invited speaker, the following presentation was given to the Heritage Area Board members on May 27th, 2021.  The presentation biriefly summarizes my investigation into recent sea level rise and coastal erosion issues in Dorchester County.

Recent archaeological investigations conducted by the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in Northumberland County, Virginia, have concentrated on examining the Coan Hall site (44NB11), a seventeenth century homestead belonging to John Mottrom.  Less is known about the adjacent Native American center of Sekakawon (44NB111), whose occupation coincides with the early occupation of Coan Hall but which has been subjected to limited evaluation.  In order to better evaluate the extent of both of these resources, site-wide ground-penetrating radar and gradiometer surveys were conducted during the 2014-2017 field season and for one week in December 2018.  This paper will explore the ways in which the complex political climate of the Potomac River Valley shaped the organization of both Sekakawon and Coan Hall as well as how evidence of interactions between these two communities may be further explored with targeted future archaeological investigations.