St. Leonard, MD – Archaeologists have labored in the hot sun. In winter, when soy beans were off the planted fields, they continued with shovel test pits across a wide expanse of some 33 acres.
St. Mary’s College Professor of Anthropology Dr. Julia A. King and her students’ research is an effort to find the Native American village of Cecomocomoco, detailed on Captain John Smith’s 1608 map of Virginia on the eastern shore of the Wicomico River near Chaptico.
After two years of hard work, King believes they may have located the pre-Columbian village.
“We think that it is,” King told a recent gathering at the Maryland Archaeological Laboratory at Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum in St. Leonard.
King showed charts revealing the information revealed by the research, noting different types of pottery catalogued by students, including Accokeek (1,000 B.C.-1,500 A.D.), Pope’s Creek (500 B.C.-300 A.D.), Moakley (200 B.C.-900 A.D.) and Townsend (950-1,600 A.D.). Of the four types, Townsend was most prevalent, indicating that the greatest period of occupation was during that time.
Portions of the test area were in a significant plow zone of farmland. A Cammel Coal trading bead was found in an area where modern disturbance was less.
“That is also the location of an early 17th-century colonial site,” King said. “That area shows good preservation.”
She said her students collected 50,000 grams of oyster shell in the test pit surveys, adding that different size shells and different patterns and worm borings on shell can indicate age. King also noted that most of the spear points found in testing were quartz and quartzite, but “very little rhyolite, which is interesting,” she stated.
Rhyolite was a type of stone imported on trade routes from what is present-day Shenandoah Valley and western Pennsylvania and may have been part of earlier trade goods. Many of the rhyolite points unearthed in the region may date from a much earlier period in pre-Columbian history.
The Cammel coal bead may have come from as far away as northern Michigan, King pointed out.
Piscataway Canoy tribal councilmember Mario Harley acknowledged that trade was significant among his people. “Trade was an important part of our culture,” he said. “We were not an isolated people. We knew about what was happening in Jamestown through our trade routes.” He added King’s research has prompted his people to rethink certain aspects of their history.
“We have an oral history,” Harley said. “We’re often working from the same book. The data leads you down a different path. It redefines Indians in Maryland.”
What is fascinating is that even as King’s students are bringing to light information about the Choptico Indians’ village, a subtribe of the Piscataways (most were related through marriage ties), local Native Americans are seeing a resurgence in their culture. Turkey Tayak, chief of the tribe in the 1950s until his death in the mid-1970s, is credited with that effort. It took an act of Congress to have him buried on traditional land in Accokeek, now the site of a national park.
“There was a time when Native American people went underground,” said Francis Gray, Piscataway Canoy tribal chairman. “There was no record identifying us as Native American. Being Indian wasn’t cool. Now there has been a cultural revival. Our history in Maryland runs deep. For us to truly understand who we are today, we have to understand where we came from.”
Contact Joseph Norris at joe.norris@thebaynet.com