On Apr 16, 2007, at 10:45 AM, Debra Jackson/Harold Forsythe wrote: > Anthropology needs to come to the aid of history here. From the > perspective of New York City, Virginia isn't settled yet. Where > are its rafts of 40 story buildings? > > Seriously, human beings have traversed a set of economic uses of > the land. OK, here's a bit more. First, you have the nomadic hunters as in Paleo Clovis and possibly their predecessors (not yet gone to the jury, still in the midst of investigation) > From hunting and gathering to pastorialism Nope, they skipped the animal husbandry step and went to dispersed settlement incipient horticulture to sometimes palisaded settlement horticulture but with Hunting and Gathering still part of the process. Then came the Euros in the 1500's onward with an entirely different mindset. > to swidden agriculture to village or settled agriculture to > industrialization to what some call post-industrialization. > > The Indians of eastern Virginia practiced swidden or slash and burn > migratory agriculture, supplemented by hunting when the Europeans > arrived. They, of course, brought village agriculture, expansive > but non-migratory with them. The Indians certainly considered > themselves "settled" on the land but their practices were different > from the English. While village or settled agriculture used less > land (or land reserves) for crops, they made up for it by keeping > pastures: in New England sheep predominated, in the Southeast pigs > predominated. There's a slow progression from the Paleo to the Archaic where nomads begin to have territories as they produced more little Paleo people and even more Archaic little people who grew into bigger ones and went off to settle their own areas. Somewhere at the end of the H/G era, incipient horticulture began. Maize spread from Mexico (now starting back at around 7200BC) to VA in the Archaic and with the other plants, developed as population grew and the demands of sitting in one spot to grow stuff also grew. > > The anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that each progression in > economic systems actually requires human being to do more work, and > is thus forced by environmental and prudential causes. (See Marvin > Harris, Cannibals and Kings.) The Powatans could have done village > agriculture but their population didn't require it and it was > repugnant to them. > Their two types of settlements were traditionally termed dispersed hamlets and palisaded villages. However, there are dispersed hamlet bigtime problems and their are palisaded village bigtime problems with what is actually meant. Palisaded villages are relatively easy to find. They're soil marks as either giant donut shaped black circles, or solid disc shaped circles. Lots of pottery, lithics, bone, shell, etc. littering the surface. The unpalisaded villages are more akin to what John White drew for the Roanoke Island Native Americans. Basically suburban settlements with a group of houses with space between them. The spacing is about equivalent to the 2-3 acre lot suburban or exurban subdivision of today, but without the regularity. These were thought to be the immediate precursors to palisaded settlements. The palisade is a defensive measure that starts in the 14th century AD. But it is not a universal and there were plenty of villages that Capt. J. Smith visited that were not palisaded. I view them as the first enforced nucleation. What I think happens is that hamlets grow with the success of horticulture augmented by the usual hunting and gathering (horticulture would imply a vegetarian society in its purist form). So one would see available land settled by these non-palisaded villages. Where there is an external threat, then the palisade comes into being. Some villages show numerous rebuilds, overlapping house patterns, intercutting pits so they were basically getting to the tell building stage similar the Middle-Eastern civilizations, albeit much later. The tell is the best model because apart from one mound in Lee County, there are no temple mounds of the type that spread from Mexico and reached into the Southeast to North Carolina. Tells are simply accretional mounds that are built up as folks live in one spot for hundreds and thousands of years. Palisades may have come and gone as threats waxed and waned as well. The picture is complicated. What the English encountered were a series of villages, mostly unpalisaded, under the overall control of Powhatan. They practiced a form of swidden horticulture. The telling phrase is that they moved "when the crops wouldn't grow and the children started dying". The reference of poison fields is that the soils were exhausted by the Native Americans and they'd moved to another area to set up shop again. They were no better or worse than any other group and weren't living the idylic "In harmony with Nature" that is so PC at the moment. The determining factor was that they had space to do what amounted to fallow field crop rotation. When population densities grow higher, they would have had the same old issues as the rest of the human populace as in "I'm already here and you cannot move in". "Oh, yes I can, because I'm bigger and stronger and you're out of here" that passes for normal human interaction when there's competition for the same limited resources. They just hadn't reached that stage yet. The introduction of the Euro's into the landscape forced a whole new dynamic with competition between two world views. Lyle Browning, RPA > Harold S. Forsythe > ----- Original Message ----- From: <[log in to unmask]> > To: <[log in to unmask]> > Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 10:13 AM > Subject: Re: Virginia Npblemen > > >> What do you mean by settled? As far as I can tell, Virginia >> wasn't settled >> under the common definition of the word until the English came in >> and put >> down permanent roots. >> >> J South >> >> Of course, no one from England, noble or otherwise, "settled >> Virginia"--it >> was already settled long before the English showed up. >> >> >> >> ************************************** See what's free at http:// >> www.aol.com.