The Monacan Nation: Jefferson's Archaeological Subject

The Virginia that most people know from the history books is a Tidewater story. English colonists, the Powhatan Confederacy, tobacco, the James River. The Blue Ridge and the Piedmont beyond it, the lands where Monticello and Montpelier now stand, are in the homeland of a different people entirely.

The Monacan Indian Nation was Siouan-speaking, distinct from the Algonquian-speaking Powhatan peoples of the coast. They lived along the upper James River and its tributaries, in the hills and forests of the Virginia Piedmont, for centuries before European contact. When the English arrived on the coast and began recording their encounters with Indigenous peoples, they wrote almost entirely about the Powhatan, because the Powhatan were the people they were in contact with. The Monacan appear in the English record primarily as enemies of the Powhatan, which is how the English understood them, not as a people with their own history.

Thomas Jefferson excavated a Monacan burial mound on his Monticello property in the seventeen eighties. He dug carefully, stratified his findings, recorded his observations methodically. The work is often cited as one of the earliest examples of systematic archaeological excavation in North America, and by the standards of its time it was rigorous. It was also the excavation of a site that the Monacan people regarded as sacred, carried out without consultation or permission, on land that had been taken from them. Both things are true.

The Monacan Nation was state-recognized by Virginia in nineteen eighty-nine, more than three hundred years after the English colonial period began. Federal recognition did not come until twenty eighteen. Their cultural center is in Amherst, Virginia, in the hills of the central Piedmont. They have been here since before Jefferson's house was built on the mountain above them. The mound he excavated is still there.