Indian Village Artifacts Find Home at Jamestown

By Matt Poms Friday, June 04, 2010

A vast archaeological collection unearthed during the creation of James City County’s upscale Governor’s Land community in the early 1990s has been donated to the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation to boost scholarly research. Much of the collection, which numbers almost 120,000 pieces, stems from Paspahegh, a Powhatan Indian village that stood at the time of Jamestown’s 1607 founding and represents an important cultural meeting ground between Powhatans and early English settlers.

“This is, for the story of early Colonial-Indian relations in Virginia, as important as Jamestown,” Tom Davidson, senior curator for the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation, said. “It’s the other half of the Jamestown story. Indians and Englishman were interacting at Jamestown, but Indians and Englishman, perhaps the same people, were also interacting at Paspahegh, which is only a short distance away. This is a very significant site.”

When construction on the Governor’s Land community began in the late 1980s, builders frequently began turning up historical artifacts, and the James River Institute for Archaeology was brought in to conduct a dig. Excavation yielded a massive collection, and the pieces were passed back to the Governor’s Land Foundation after initial study by the James River Institute.

Some artifacts went on display at Historic Jamestown, and others were featured in the clubhouse of the community’s Two Rivers Country Club.

But the majority of the collection went into storage, with little access possible to researchers or the general public.

“It was spread around in different places,” Earl Hopgood, vice president of the Governor’s Land Homeowner’s Association, said. “There are still boxes we are running down.”

Over a decade later, the Foundation decided it was time to pass that history along.

The choice of recipient for the collection was easy. After establishing a committee 18 months ago to oversee the donation, Governor’s Land arrived at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation due to its resources and stature in the area.

“Our criteria were an organization that could preserve these [artifacts] for future scholarship and had the resources to catalog them and develop a database that would be available to the broader community so that a future researcher could find this stuff,” Hopgood said. “We wanted to ensure that it would be available to the research community, we hope, for forever.”

But before ownership of the collection could be transferred, a complete inventory had to be done of the entire compilation.

“It’s quite a hefty record-keeping problem, but it’s well worth it considering the valuable historical information that’s contained in the collection,” Davidson said. “We’ve basically been working our way through.”

That process has been underway for over a year and was recently completed, smoothing the way for the donation to be finalized.

A small number of pieces from the collection are already on display at Historic Jamestowne, and the items kept at Two Rivers Country Club will be retained. But the public will never see the vast majority of artifacts; they will become part of a research archive, to be used by scholars and researchers to build a better understanding of Paspahegh, as well as the early interactions between the Powhatan and English.

The collection also features material from other time periods, including evidence of what may be the oldest slave quarter site in Virginia dating from the late 17th century.

“We feel that, with the collection, there is a unique connection with pre-colonial Virginia that is unique, and that is what we are trying to make our residents and others aware of,” Hopgood said.