sporadic occupation from 17,000 years to 14,500 years BP. People and megafauna overlapped before the animals’ extinction around 11,000 years ago.
(warm period). Terrestrial species increased in importance over aquatic species. At 1,000 years ago, many more native people lived along the coastal plain than in the interior (Rice 2009). The Fall Line prevented anadromous fish from ascending higher into the country.
During Paleo-Indian times (17,000 to 10,000 BP), habitation would have included small hunting camps in locations offering a variety of animal habitat types, especially near water. By Late Woodland times indigenous lives included aspects we Landscape diversity was critical. As climate warmed during the commonly associate with American Indians: corn was farmed, Holocene Climatic Optimum, vegetation shifted to deciduous large burial mounds were constructed on floodplains of major forest and mast trees, and as streams, and villages were built. It was not difficult to find a place with good megafauna were killed off, people Yet, even by the 1200s, Potomac adapted. During Archaic times region peoples “remained fishing, or level riverfront soils, or freshwater (10,000 to 3,000 BP) upland sites societies with agriculture rather marshes, or mixed deciduous forests, but few had robust use as people seasonally than agricultural societies” (Rice places had all of these necessities of life. migrated from rivers, to uplands, 2009 p.29). Where all of these features came together, one and back. People used aquatic resources such as anadromous fish People built stockade villages, could find a settlement. (Rice 2014 p.62.) and mussels, and switched to primarily along larger rivers. Rice upland mast from oaks and (2009) suggests this architecture chestnuts in the fall. (Oak Spring has dozens of artifacts from was a result of chronic warfare attributed to stresses from the this time period; see Archeology in Part 2.) onset of the Little Ice Age (beginning roughly at year 1400). As robust agriculture developed during the preceding The Woodland period (3,000 BP to 1,600 CE) brought to the centuries, populations grew. As climate became less region ceramic pottery and the bow and arrow. Trade goods conducive to agriculture, stresses emerged. People moved moved materials from north of the Potomac and the down latitude and downslope to warmer, more fertile areas. Shenandoah Valley to Piedmont Virginia and beyond. In Piedmont oak-hickory forests offered the best locations for Middle Woodland times (500 BCE to 900 CE) native people game but “by the end of the 16th century, the interior above adopted agriculture, and the primary habitation sites became the Fall Line was almost completely uninhabited” (Rice 2009 backwater wetlands on floodplains with rich soils. Agriculture p. 47). Egloff and Woodward (2006), however, note that began in earnest around 900 CE during the climatic optimum Capitan Smith in 1608, and other explorers later, observed
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