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Primary Source of the Month

"The Town of Pomeiooc," engraved by Theodor de Bry, plate 19 in Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, London, England, 1590. From the collections of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
"The Town of Pomeiooc," engraved by Theodor de Bry, plate 19 in Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, London, England, 1590. From the collections of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

People almost always leave behind physical traces anywhere they have lived. Physical evidence includes both features and artifacts. Features are man-made disturbances in the soil such as pits, walls, ditches, post holes, foundations, or trash pits. Artifacts are objects that were made, modified, or used by people. Examples of artifacts include projectile points, pottery, animal bones, broken ceramics, glass, and metal objects. The English colonists who settled in Jamestown, Virginia, left behind a wide array of artifacts. Since 1994, archaeological excavations at the site of the 1607 James Fort have revealed over one million artifacts that were last used by the Jamestown colonists nearly four hundred years ago. Careful examination of these artifacts is helping archaeologists to learn what daily life was like in the first permanent English settlement in North America.

Reconstructing the lives of the Native Americans who were well established in the Chesapeake Bay region when the first English colonists arrived has been particularly difficult. Powhatan Indian life was structured by the natural world around them. Their houses, tools, and many other objects were made from organic materials which decompose rapidly, significantly reducing the quantity of artifacts available for study. Also, because Powhatan Indian culture was based on an oral tradition, all of the primary source documents from the period that describe Powhatan culture were created by the English and other Europeans. Despite the inherent European bias of those sources, historians have long relied on them to understand what daily life was like for seventeenth-century Powhatan Indians. Among the very few visual resources from the period are John White’s 1585 watercolors and Theodor de Bry’s 1590 engravings based on White’s watercolors.

In 1585 John White, an artist and cartographer, accompanied the expedition that attempted to establish the first English colony in North America on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina. White’s instructions were to “draw to life one of each kind of thing that is strange to us in England.” During his nearly thirteen months on Roanoke Island, he created a series of over seventy watercolors of indigenous people, plants, and animals. In 1590, Theodore de Bry reprinted Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. De Bry illustrated the text with a series of copperplate engravings based on White’s watercolors.

The engraving “The Town of Pomeiooc” (above) shows, from John White’s perspective, how the Algonquian Indians in present-day Virginia and North Carolina lived before European colonists arrived. From this and the other White watercolors and de Bry engravings, historians can infer details about the possible layout of Native American villages, Native house construction, and daily activities. To see the text that accompanied this engraving, view many other de Bry engravings (and their comparable White watercolors), and read descriptions of the images, visit the Virtual Jamestown Web site.