Mapping the Gift Path: Exchange and Rivalry in John Smith's A True Relation

The Archaeology of Native Societies in the Chesapeake: New Investigations and Interpretations

“…New and recently annotated editions of colonists' accounts from the early colonial era, including those emanating from Jamestown, have been published in recent decades, providing a documentary foundation for contact-period archaeology (e.g., Grumet 2001;Haile 1998;Sloan 2007;Smith and Barbour 1986;Smith and Horne 2007). Studies of historic cartography, including John Smith's Map of Virginia, have provided a geographic framework for understanding native settlement locations (e.g., Turner and Opperman 1993), political geographies (Gallivan 1997;Potter 2009), colonial strategies of appropriation (Harley 1992;Hatfield 2003), contact-period semiotics (Boelhower 2003), and native toponymy (Potter 2002). Several small-scale excavations conducted prior to 1990 identified evidence of European trade items in Native American contexts that date to the protohistoric 16th century and the early 17th-century contact period (Hodges 1993).…”