Research ArticlesMARTIN D. GALLIVANPowhatan’s Werowocomoco: Constructing Place,Polity, and Personhood in the Chesapeake,C.E. 1200–C.E. 1609ABSTRACT Colonial encounters within the Powhatan village of Werowocomoco in Tidewater Virginia have captured the public’simagination through romantic literature and popular films. Shifting the focus of inquiry away from English colonial narratives and towarda history of landscape provides an alternative understanding of Werowocomoco as a Native place. Archaeological investigation hasidentified evidence of earthworks and related social practices that altered Werowocomoco’s built environment and subjective experiencesof its spaces in ways that colonial chroniclers failed to appreciate. A landscape history combining built environments, cognitive maps,and spatial practices across the historic–precontact divide indicates that the settlement became a ritualized location for the productionof political status and social personhood well before English colonization in the Chesapeake. Spatial practices rooted in Algonquiancosmology and centered on Werowocomoco shaped the origins of the Powhatan chiefdom and early colonial history through whichPowhatans sought to incorporate Jamestown colonists into their world. A biography of Werowocomoco as a Native place illustrateshow a deep historical anthropology may challenge notions of a “prehistoric” past comprised of homogenized societies lacking history.[Keywords: historical anthropology, colonial encounters, landscape archaeology, chiefdoms, Powhatans]IN DECEMBER 1607, Jamestown colonist John Smithtook the colony’s shallop westward five miles to themouth of the Chickahominy River (Smith 1986d:43–59).Seven months prior, 104 English men and boys had landedon Powhatan’s River (now the James) and began construct-ing James Fort and the first permanent English colony in theAmericas. While separated from his men near the Chicka-hominy’s headwaters, Smith was attacked and captured bya large Native force led by Opechancanough, the Pamunkeyweroance (commander) and brother of Wahunsenacawh,paramount of the Powhatan chiefdom. In the followingweeks, Smith’s captors conducted him on a circuitous path-way through Tidewater Virginia, moving from the hunt-ing grounds of the interior eastward to the horticulturalvillage of Werowocomoco, Wahunsenacawh’s principal res-idence. Smith’s accounts of his captivity emphasize themanner in which Opechancanough, Wahunsenacawh, andPowhatan priests orchestrated his experience of the Chesa-peake landscape, steering him through a series of Nativeplaces and rituals.Centuries later, Smith’s writings have been translatedinto evocative narratives focused on his near-death experi-ence and purported rescue by Wahunsenacawh’s daughterPocahontas. These stories have entered the realm of U.S.AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 109, Issue 1, pp. 85–100, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433.C2007 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rightsand Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/AA.2007.109.1.85.folklore, initially as a result of 19th-century novels andpoetry centered on Pocahontas’s relationship with Smithand more recently through animated and live-action filmsemphasizing similar themes. Largely lost in these repre-sentations, though, is Werowocomoco’s role as a politi-cized and ritualized place within which Wahunsenacawhsought to remake Smith as a weroance. After being aban-doned by Wahunsenacawh in 1609 and largely forgottenin subsequent centuries, the site of Werowocomoco has be-come, once again, a politicized place as heritage promoters,Powhatan descendants, and local citizens prepare for the400th memorial of Jamestown’s founding, often with dif-fering agendas.Recent efforts to study the Werowocomoco site seek toresituate the settlement’s past by looking beyond events in-volving Wahunsenacawh, Pocahontas, and Smith and to-ward a broader set of cultural practices that left traces inthe archaeological record, documentary accounts, oral tra-ditions, and ethnographic accounts of related Algonquiangroups (Gallivan et al. 2006). One method of making thisshift involves contextualizing colonial narratives within ahistory of built spaces, conceptual landscapes, and spa-tial practices. Encounters with places of Native power of-ten appear as an initial chapter in the annals of European86 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 1 • March 2007colonialism. From Hern´an Cort´es’ arrival in the imposingMexica center of Tenochtitlan (Todorov 1984) to WilliamBartram’s experiences within the Cherokees’ less monu-mental council houses and plazas (Bartram and Squier1853), colonial histories highlight Amerindian landscapesof political and sacred authority.As discussed in the following, Werowocomoco’s land-scape history indicates that social practices centered onthe village incorporated Algonquian conceptions of space,which shaped the precontact emergence of the Powhatanchiefdom and subsequent colonial encounters in theChesapeake. The settlement was redefined as a ritualizedand politicized node within a social landscape of cen-tral places constructed by Algonquian communities inthe Chesapeake after C.E. 1200. During the subsequentProtohistoric and early colonial periods, Werowocomoco’sspaces were fundamental to the creation of new forms ofpolitical status and social personhood, including those as-sumed by Wahunsenacawh and by Smith.The impact of cultural practices within such livedspaces over the long term—that is, landscape’s “temporal-ity” (Ingold 1993)—makes archaeology essential to a his-torical anthropology that takes seriously the pasts of “peo-ple without history” (Wolf 1982). Indeed, some “silences”(Trouillot 1995) in documentary sources may be addressedthrough the study of landscapes that substantiate the histo-ries of social institutions (e.g., Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995).By tracing the history of landscape features that were over-looked or misconstrued by European chroniclers, archae-ology offers the potential to challenge colonial narrativesand to recover meanings otherwise lost (Norman and Kelly2004). The social creation of meaningful space (i.e., place)incorporates a wider vision of spatiotemporal references(i.e., landscape)