Description
"Natural Understandings" explores early Virginia's history from the perspective of its margins. By looking at Virginia from the vantage points of its northern and western frontiers instead of centering the story on the James River, and by making Native Americans the primary actors, "Natural Understandings" enhances reader's appreciation of early Virginia's heterogeneous yet deeply interrelated peoples and regions. It explores the connections between environmental change, cultural formations, and political structures in the Potomac Basin over an 1100-year period. Deriving evidence and concepts from ethnohistory, oral traditions, history, archaeology, and environmental studies, it situates colonial-era events in the context of long-term developments in America and Europe, and traces the influence of indigenous peoples in the Potomac Basin down to the present day. It argues that long-term, precolonial developments amongst Native Americans profoundly shaped cultural and political formations in colonial societies and in the United States. Native adaptations to environmental changes during the cirtical period of 700 A.D. to 1600 created a complex cultural and political landscape to which European newcomers had to adapt. Thus indians governed the timing, extent, and character of colonization in Virginia--a colony that became an important cultural hearth for the expansion of the United States into Appalachia and the plantation South.
