Of Parsimony and Archaeological Histories: A Response to Comment by Boyd

Abstract

Boyd (2004) questions the cultural association that we (Dunham et al. 2003:113) draw between burial mounds in central Virginia and the colonial era Monacan Indian people. We respond to Boyd's points, agree that any such interpretation be open to further discussion, but defend our cultural and historical interpretation as the most logical and parsimonious given the available data.

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

“…A study of Virginia burial mounds (Dunham et al 2003;Hantman et al 2004) has established that a connection between the mounds and the contemporary Monacans of central Virginia is most ''parsimoniously concordant'' with the archaeological and documentary evidence, whereas Boyd (2004b) has countered that the mounds cannot be associated confidently with any known Native American group. Another recent study, prompted by a repatriation request from the Nansemond tribe, has concluded that human remains from the 17th-century Hand site located on the Nottoway River in Virginia exhibit more affinities with Iroquoian practices than with those associated with the Nansemonds' Algonquian ancestors (Mudar et al 1998).…”

The Legend of Jump Mountain: Narrative Dispossession of the Monacan in Postcolonial Virginia

“…Furthermore, they point out that the John Smith map gives the Monacan a presence in the Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountains of central Virginia in 1608 and that this tends to affirm Monacan territory as "generally congruent with the locations of the mountains while they [the mounds] were in use." 7 While both English and Spanish observers during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries mention a long-standing enmity between the Monacans à à à and the Powhatans, because there was no recent evidence of territorial intrusion, the Monacan Alliance appears to have been stably rooted in the mound' s territory in central Virginia.…”