Professor King to Speak on Recent Discoveries about Native Americans in Middlesex
Professor Julia Ann King of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, will be returning to Middlesex County on Sunday, May 5 in order to deliver a 4 PM lecture on recent discoveries concerning Native American settlement and trading patterns in Tidewater Virginia in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods. The lecture will take place at Locust Grove Farm. For details on attending the event, contact the museum info@middlesexmuseum.com or by phone 804-758-3663
Professor King, who is the chair of the Department of Anthropology at St. Mary’s, has been involved in archaeological digs of sites in Middlesex, King and Queen, and Westmoreland Counties. From November 2022 to April 2023, she served as the principal investigator of an archeological exploration of a site on Locust Grove Farm overlooking Whiting Creek. She and the team from St. Mary’s had hoped to learn more about the mysterious Opiscopank town mapped by John Smith in 1608. Over the course of their excavations, the archaeologists recovered hundreds of Native-made ceramics, Native-made tobacco pipes, oyster shells, and an unusual blue glass bead. The artifacts all point to a late 16th-century and possibly early 17th-century date—a settlement whose residents might have watched Smith’s convoy enter and begin its exploration of the Rappahannock River. While cataloging the artifacts, archaeologists realized that, while most of the ceramics are exactly the types one would expect to see on the Rappahannock River, a sizable percentage are of a type known only for the James and York River valleys. Dr. King’s presentation will examine the historical possibilities that add to understanding of this phase of early Indigenous history.
Professor King is a noted historical archaeologist. A graduate of the College of William and Mary (B.A.), Florida State University (M.A. in Anthropology,) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Historical Archaeology), she has received significant awards for her work, including the Out-of-State Award from the Archaeological Society of Virginia and the J.C. Harrington Award for Lifetime Contributions from the Society for Historical Archaeology.
