Chowan River Ramblings, Part Two
How long have people been living around here, i.e., the land around the Albemarle Sound and the major rivers that flow into it— the Chowan and Roanoke?
Searching for a credible answer, I read about recent findings of archaeologists across America. Reporting what I’ve learned might make this column a bit “geeky,” but please bear with me; my stories will “heat up” considerably once I get to the time of European exploration. At that point, I’ll be able to draw from first-hand, personal accounts of some transformational events and very human stories that set a very different direction for our locale and for America as a whole.
Archaeologists currently believe that the first Americans came from Asia to North America as early as 30,000 years ago, maybe earlier. We all learned in school that they walked over on a land or ice bridge that stretched from today’s Russia to Alaska, running along today’s chain of islands called the Aleutians. Some people may have also arrived from the Pacific on boats that made it to America’s western shores. By the time they arrived on our continent, the people we call Native Americans had learned to make tools for hunting animals, catching fish, and preparing food. They had also learned to kill large animals by organizing hunting parties. They became so proficient at it that they likely hunted both the American Mammoth and the American Mastodon to extinction.
By 20,000 years ago, humans had ventured into most every livable place in America. Scientists call the Native Americans of that era “Paleo-Indians.” They were nomadic hunters, distinguished by elongated spearpoints they developed that anthropologists call “Clovis” after a town in New Mexico near where they were first identified. Clovis points have since been found all over North and South America. One of the most productive sites for Clovis points was found in 1947, just up the road in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, which has turned up hundreds of them. Clovis points have also been found throughout present-day North Carolina, so these Paleo-Indian nomads were the first humans to roam about our area.
Around 10,000 years ago, vegetation in our area changed from boreal conifers to mixed hardwoods and pines as the climate continued to warm after the last Ice Age. The large Clovis spear points of the Paleo-Indians changed to smaller spear points that archeologists have classified using names such as Guilford, Halifax, Hardaway, Kirk, Morrow Mountain, and Stanly. Smaller points enabled more efficient hunting of game that now included bison, deer, turkey, rabbit, and even fish, wherever there was water.
Anthropologists refer to the timespan of 10,000 to 3,000 years ago as the Archaic period in America. The landscape around here began to look like it did to the first European explorers. Local inhabitants learned to cultivate corn, beans, and squash, which they called “The Three Sisters,” to supplement the meat they hunted. Farming allowed them to live in one location year-round, so they built villages as more permanent communities and fortresses against rival tribes. They also learned to produce pottery from clay, including bowls for cooking and pipes for smoking tobacco, which they found had a narcotic effect so pleasant that they began growing it and smoking the aromatic, dried leaf at ceremonies and social events.
Americans of the Archaic period have left many artifacts in eastern North Carolina. Most of them are found along sandy ridges near rivers and sounds, where people have always liked to live. Archaic period artifacts I have found on our family farm by the Tar River include Kirk and Halifax spear points, hide scrapers, pottery shards, a stone ax head, and part of a “banner stone,” a polished piece of granite with a hole drilled in it that was worn as a pendant.
My artifact findings around the Chowan River have not been so prolific. The only local artifact I’ve found is a palm-sized piece of clay cookware spotted in my own backyard while a contractor was digging a waterline. You can tell by the photo that it has curvature, showing that it once was a large bowl in which hot coals were placed around meat that was cooked. The “inside” of the piece is blackened by the char of many burning coals over the years of its use. The other side has pockmarks that were made by rolling an ear of corn over its surface before it dried.
The Archaic period was followed by the Woodland period around 2,000 years ago, when American Indians started hunting with bows and arrows. No one knows how they learned to make this wonderful, new hunting tool. Some folks claim they learned it from early Norse explorers of America, but that is another story. Woodland period points are even smaller and were more effective for hunting because of the speed, force, and accuracy they achieved when shot from a bow. This also made the bow-and-arrow useful for warfare.
The Woodland period for Native Americans extended until Europeans arrived. By then, there were many groups of American Indians living all over present-day North Carolina, from the farming and fishing tribes of the Tidewater region to the great hunters and warriors of the Cherokee Nation in the mountains. Most historians believe the Native American population was in the millions before European explorers showed up with infectious diseases such as measles, smallpox, and the common flu. Those diseases were deadly to Native Americans who had never been exposed to them. They spread rapidly across Indian communities, wiping out villages and markedly reducing the Native American population well before most European settlers arrived. Such was the state of things in America when Europeans started showing up in the 16th century.
You might be surprised that the first Europeans to try to colonize our area were Spaniards. Decades before the so-called Lost Colony of English settlers, the Spanish attempted to colonize the Atlantic coast north of Florida at least twice. Spaniards from the West Indies tried to start a colony on the South Carolina coast in 1526, but most of the 200 or so colonists died of disease or starvation before the few survivors escaped. In 1570, Spanish Jesuits from Cuba tried to establish a mission on the Chesapeake Bay, but it ended when all but one of them were killed by local Indians who believed they were practicing witchcraft.
Certainly, Native Americans living in our area in the 16th century would have heard about those strange, fair-skinned people who came to shore on tall ships, for the gossip grapevine traveled quickly in those days, as it always has. Surely, they wondered when they would personally encounter these fair-skinned strangers from across the Great Salt Waters, and in 1586, they finally did.
This was shortly before the so-called Lost Colonists arrived, and that is where I will pick up in the next edition of Chowan River Ramblings.
