Virginia's First People: Full Show

[Music] [Music] [Laughter] the Y anak and that's how you pronounce it not way an oak the y anot people were folks who lived on the little reach of the James River they had their own chief but they were subject to a greater chief a paramount chief that most people have heard of in this world because he had a famous daughter the man was pallet an and the daughter was Pocahontas so the Wyatt knocks were officially the subjects of Pocahontas daddy who ruled all of eastern Virginia from Richmond Fredericksburg Washington eastward down those rivers 400 years ago Eastern Virginia looked somewhat different than it does now and looked quite different from anything that Europeans or urban Americans today were accustomed to for one thing it is a world of water and land interspersed interlaced if you like the Indians lived in their canoes not nearly as much land had been cleared for farming the Indians were farmers but there weren't as many Indians so the place looked like a wilderness to the English who arrived and if we had a time machine it would look pretty much like a wilderness to us here the rivers flow down from the white sands and through the plains and into the bay never have heaven and earth come together to form a more perfect place for habitation here a man with his freedom and good wit and hard work may make a fortune quickly the Europeans and we still today tend to see water as a barrier it's a boundary counties and cities often have rivers and creeks as their edges as their boundaries in the Indian world it was a reverse creeks and rivers were the center of territories these were people who did most of their traveling by canoe and canoes being like our minivans carry everything heavy in your canoe you take it down the roadway which is actually a waterway when a river was really really broad like the Potomac at its mouth then you would have separate tribes living on each side though they were often friends but when you got to a narrower part of the river such as the Potomac up around Fairfax County and also the James River where the white ox lived there the river was narrow enough and the paddling across was short enough that they simply considered both sides to be their territory and we see records about - why not towns on Captain John Smith's map and that's because it was the same people it was basically the same town Vioxx made their living partially by hunting and fishing and partially by farming they were not nomads at all they lived in towns and that right in amongst the houses were Gardens in which they raised corn beans and squash Europeans were not used to our corn at all and found it rather interesting and soon began buying it the people who raised the corn shocked the Europeans because it was the women women were the farmers it was the men who did the hunting and most of the fishing but the farmland was controlled by the women the women also built the houses and they wanted a shorter commute to work each day so they built the houses right close to the gardens the location of towns then was decided upon by the women because the women did the work in the town the men were out they wouldn't have had much say about where the town went but the center of everything was the water because everybody was in and out of the water water was also a major source of their food with fish and shellfish of various kinds so they were constantly going to the water just to get part of that night supper water was central they had to have waterfront towns and for that reason you find the maps showing Indian towns only along the rivers and some of the creeks you don't find Indian towns way back away from the river that was hunting territory it was public hunting land so you're not going to find Indian towns back there the Blackhawk Indians only appear for a few decades in the records in Virginia this didn't mean that they got massacred by anybody they didn't he doesn't mean that they died out they didn't it means that they moved they continued living on their James River land on both sides of the James River beautiful farmland there by the way some of the best in the state Eenie is knew how to find good farmland but they had to move away from it after the war with the English of 1644 246 the pressure the English could put on them by that time drove them away from James River and they went clear down into northeastern North Carolina and settled briefly in a number of places always on a creek bank always in places that were claimed by somebody else and eventually they simply gave the thing up and they merged with another tribe the people they merged with were the not aways when the not aways and the wine ox and some nan Simmons took English names which happened after 1700 then you have some of the why not descendants taking the name wine oak why not wine oak and eventually that name died out but the people would have had descendants eventually the not always dispersed all together and there are not away descendants all over the United States and some of them have got some Waianae ancestry [Music] my name is Mike barber with the departments to work resources on the state archeologists we're here in Richmond and the Virginia's artifact collection room where we have artifacts which are used for educational purposes in the back we have another 6.5 million artifacts right now we're going to look at some some tools that are like those that may have been used at the wine a village site here is probably a typical earlier arrow point and once you got to the call most of the contact period you started seeing these arrow points that were like this so progressively gotten smaller and in fact as they reduced and scored reduced in size they were more effective because that better penetrating ability I have an example here of a tool that was used for digging basically a hoe and originally archaeologists thought that was haft it like this and was used as an axe but you can see from the wear patterns on these things the most up more hafted like this if this is the handle and they were used in digging and you can see the wear pattern along the edge with this edge is smooth from the friction of digging in the ground and this edge is not so again a hey-ho like motion dig up roots and things of that sort now this is this is the drawer that holds a lot of the bone tools this is my favorite kind of stuff this is a very common tool during the late woodland times and this is the lower leg bone of a white-tailed deer probably don't know it but deer have basically two knees this particular bone is in your ankle in fact it's two bones in your ankle white tailed deer it's sort of the lower leg bone that articulates with the hoof but in any case what they've done is they've taken this they've hollowed it out and you can see the lines where they hollowed it out and then they use it as a draw knife to process deer hides and other hides as well pretty interesting tool some sites we find hundreds of these and to me it indicates that not only are they processing a whole lot of deer hides but they're probably engaged in trading these deer hides for other commodities because they're producing so many this is something you find on a lot of sites and it's a Eastern Box Turtle and it's been hollowed out and made into a cup the three highest collected animals on both site is first the white-tailed deer then the turkey and the third animal is the box turtle this is another type of artifact we find on prehistoric sites that I find fascinating the use of the Virginia Indians of tobacco during prehistoric times with Native Americans it was something that was was used only during certain ceremonies or religious activities here's a typical early/late woodland pipe that made of clay fired clay another example you can see the bowls are quite small so there's not a whole lot of tobacco being smoked but again for religious or ceremonial reasons as time went on and we hit the colonial period something happened that was quite interesting and you get pipes that are dark decorated like this you can see the starburst pattern which is quite unique and this was something that happened during colonial times the decorations are obviously made with colonial tools but we're not sure exactly who the makers were some of these motifs go back into prehistoric times let's take a look at the artifacts we have in this cabinet these things are some of the most interesting artifacts I've seen in a long time for this particular artifact is a Kirk stamin point any point you find in Virginia that's not a triangular point was most likely a spear point so this is a spear point it's of interest in that when you have tip onto the shaft or the spear that's what stuck out so this is one that was probably near its end of its life span approaching exhaustion and they probably threw it away here's another one that's a little later in time again hard to believe that this is a spear point probably use with an atlatl we'll talk about addle addle in a little while but you can see when you have to this point that's what would stick out so you can see that would be very ineffective originally the point is probably this long but through exhaustion and a reef brief sharpening through time this is what you have left so ineffective get rid of it these are sort of middle woodland points you know in the 6000 the 4000 year BC range and by the time you get to the line of the village time period you're dealing with points that look like this trying other points these are arrow points the bow and arrow was probably invented somewhere around maybe a thousand BC but as time went on they started using these smaller and smaller and smaller triangular points and that's what we see here this is one of the native courts probably typical of that area this is one example that I was looking for this is again one of those large broad Spears during the late archaic time period this is about twenty-five hundred to a thousand BC but you can see the difference in the edges here this edge is fairly straight where this one is curved this one is curved from use and reach sharpening and in fact this was haft it and used as a cutting tool as a knife and you can see the wear along this edge and that's typical of these types of points perhaps they were used as spear points but in essence a lot of those you can see the weird pattern where they were converted into mice now this is the drawer that holds a lot of the bone tools this is the kind of stuff that really fascinates me that I guess it's the concept of of bones and then taking those Bowlin bones and make him into something functional you may not be aware of but this is a tar so metatarsal from a turkey lower leg bone from a turkey and these were very very good bones to make very very sharp all's you can see the point here and these things were used for poking holes driving holes into deer hides and things of that sort these are some of the most easily made tools this is the ulna the own one of the arm bones or front leg bones from white-tailed deer and basically it's it's shaped in this manner naturally and all they do is sharpen the end and again you can see that the sharpness you can see where the use is it's actually tapered at the end to this very sharp point and this one not so much but you can see again it's tapered from use this is a deer antler and you can see it's been hollowed out and this was probably made into a headdress and probably used by the shaman or the religious practitioner and ceremonial activities another another product that we're making in fair numbers were bone fish hooks and they were - two techniques they used primarily one was from the ulna and another one was from deer toe bones themselves they would cut those in half and make him into fish hooks occasionally you'll find things of this sort although this was probably not a tool this is a part of a bear skull and this is the one of the canines a lot of times you'll see these canines perforated for suspension and they would wear them as gorgeous or things of that sort this is some of the most interesting types of artifacts we have here at the department store tree sources these have been recovered since the 19th century folks wondered what on earth they were they're very highly polished they're pretty ornate certainly decorative and they were confused archeologists for many many years and what archeologists finally decided that these things were obviously high-status items and in fact early on they called them banner stones and what they thought was that the chief would have a staff and on this staff he'd have some of these stones which would demonstrate his high status within the village itself did further research on several sites you can see their variety here is just amazing but research on several sites particularly sites that they had a lot of these found in Kentucky and the question was finally answered not only by looking at artifacts but also examining other cultures around the world and I don't know if you guys realize it but archaeology is not an independent study in itself archaeology is a sub-discipline of anthropology anthropology is the study of all cultures all people at all times everywhere archaeology is the study of extinct cultures cultures that no longer exist but in order to get a better understanding of these cultures we can look at cultures that are at the same level of social organization and then use some of the analogies from those cultures to determine how artifacts like these were used let me show you a a reconstruction of how these things were used so you've seen those artifacts now we have to figure out what they are right and that's part of archaeology it's the mystery of trying to figure out what these things were used for and so we looked at the other cultures that were still in existence and artifacts that they used and perhaps you'll recognize this very similar to what we were seeing in the drawer and in this indeed is what we call and figured out was an ad a lottle week and this is an adalat 'el which throws this spear atlatl the term that was borrowed from South America and Mesoamerica where they still use these to use these things during a contact period and in essence what we have here is a spear thrower now before this a spear could be thrown by hand and I'm sure the Native Americans were very accurate with that but with the addle addle with the spear thrower it works as a simple machine lever action and when you throw this it doesn't leave your hand at the same level what happens is it extends upward and as you can thrust it it adds distance and accuracy and so this thing flies off and hopefully fits the prey the atlatl weight was an invention that helped not only with the distance by providing more weight to the throw but it also balanced helped to balance the spear itself so this is quite an invention this is something that we don't use a whole lot today so in order to figure it out archaeologists had to not only look at the archaeological record but they had a look at the ethnographic record as well one of the mysteries was how did they get the hole in the atlatl weight obviously with a hole they can more adequately tie the atlatl into place the hole itself was drilled it was probably drilled using an abrasive like sand and a stone tool and many many hours of work these polished stone tools such as the atlatl are not easily made and I'm sure that the person the hunter that was using these things was quite proud of his is the weight and probably the a de lisle itself also you can see the relationship with these things with the detachable tip which is another interesting invention so instead of having to carry ten Spears that's what they would carry in their quiver was ten of these and they throw the atlatl spear they basically hit the quarry if they didn't they'd retrieved the the spear itself and then they'd rehabbed it with another spear point so it's you know it's efficiency accuracy efficiency and an amazing tool that probably was used in Virginia for upwards to six to eight thousand years it's a very very interesting tool the contact with the palutena obviously is something that John Smith talked about in a lot of ways we've been dealing with the the where Wicomico site which is in Gloucester County and it is interesting in many ways but mostly because we have evidence of the early trade primarily we find on that particular site the trade goods are copper and it's interesting early on John Smith was trading copper for corn because of the Jamestown Settlement folks were starving so they one of the one of the corn and then what happened was you know early on you get 50 bushels of corn for a kettle and then palate and figured it out and demanded more and more and more copper and eventually the market was flooded the value of the copper deteriorated greatly originally and you can understand how this happened before contact with your pins the copper came from the Great Lakes and it didn't come in large quantities it came in small quantities and it was reserved for the Chiefs the Chiefs would make pendants out of the copper and this would denote their status copper pendant big deal and then of course when the kettles came in and the Indians started chopping those up there was so much copper that it was you know became something an unknown commodity is that you know everyday folks could get old oh so it deteriorated died as a status symbol Sarah Lee other things that were traded the glass beads came into play and were very important Powhatan preferred the white beads because they mirrored the shell beads that they were used to but in other areas they traded beads that were of many different colors and many different layers and this went from a trait for corn and to trade for deer skins and other commodities as well a little bit later obviously the wire knock and the Englishmen who arrived in Virginia did not speak the same language so the English began sending some of their younger colonists boys of 13 and 14 who were still young enough to learn languages easily send them to live among the Indians to try to learn the Powhatan language which was spoken by the wine ox the wine ox also wanted some of their young people to begin speaking English but we don't have a record of whether any Indian kids went to live with the English for that purpose but having interpreters and preferably more interpreters on the other side actually turned into a game had turned into a competition before there were good interpreters which means for the first two years of the Jamestown Colony people had to communicate between the two sets of folks by body English and facial expressions old rubber face that was the only way that they could communicate with one another and obviously then they were going to be misunderstandings it meant says the early years of the Jamestown Colony were a very rocky road for both sides and each side wound up offending the other without meaning to that's what happens if you don't speak somebody's language one kind of misunderstanding that's the English and the wine ox had early on and it continued to be a misunderstanding for many years was that the English wanted to buy corn when their own supplies ran out and they assumed that men were the heads of Indian households and so they would try to get the men to sell court it may not have been up to the men in Indian culture women raised the corn and they were perfectly capable of selling it and the English may well have offended those Indian women by refusing to talk to them and going to the husband's instead the english in the indian men had their difficulties because they were all very interested in arms for warfare most of the english colonists had been to the wars in europe and they had firearms the indian men lived in a place where raiding went on all the time the enemies for the wild ox were on the west side of richmond warfare came right to your door so the indian men were their bows and arrows and tomahawks were expert in using them they were expert marksmen but they soon realized that the english weapons initially sounding scary those weapons could shoot farther the bigger weapons anyway and since they were so all these were all military men on one sort or another they were fascinated with each other's weapons and of course the english assumed that their weapons were better which was not necessarily true and the indians were dying to see them close up and handle them and try them out and the English wouldn't allow it and that caused offense the irony is that for the wilderness over here almost complete wilderness outside the Indian towns Indian weapons were actually better because you could fire them moving fast taking cover firing again take more cover fire again the English weapons were all muzzle loading things and many of them were very very heavy some of them had to be put up on a tripod you couldn't hold them up yourself and those were meant for open field fighting well where do you find open fields in this part of the world so the English weapons were good for scaring people but they weren't that good in actual fights about 1652 1701 that was the period in which the Virginia Indians lost most of their land to encroaching settlers because the settlers were pouring in and droves and they were terrifically land hungry they were hoping to raise tobacco and make their fortune the greed was incredible and the Indians had the misfortune of not understanding that once you sold land to an English person that English person considered it to be English property for the rest of time and Indian culture didn't practice it that way if you farmed a piece of land it was yours as long as you farmed it and whenever you let it go fallow it becomes public land again it's not yours you have to share and through sales like this and sometimes simply through being run out the people lost most of their land oh and come to think of it you may like beef well the critter that makes the beef the cow was a major player in Indians losing their land cows if you have ever stood next to one are big things they're heavy they're thick they may like to step on your feet and if somebody's cows come onto your land you probably are going to have a miserable time trying to get them off again cows also have been known to eat corn and they come into an Indian person's cornfield and they start munching away and you're not big enough to drive them away so hurting your cattle onto an Indians cornfield was a real good way to get that Indian family to lose their sustenance and have to go off and get food somewhere else if it's toward the end of the growing season you're not going to raise any more corn they've got to get the stuff for their bread from various Marsh plants like Tuckahoe and so of course they're going to leave the vicinity Englishman that moves in considers the land his maybe gets a patent on it which makes it legal and the land is lost to Indian ownership thereafter [Music]

Channel: Fairfax Network - Fairfax County Public Schools

Views: 20,636

Rating: 4.6809816 out of 5

Keywords: Fairfax Network, Native Americans, American Indians, Virginia Indians

Id: FOAV-4GeWFw

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2018