ClayHound Web - Pamunkey Pottery

Return to:

Map Page


Home Pagev


The Pamunkey are located in north-eastern Virginia on the Pamunkey river.  The pottery is often characterized by the dark clay of the east.


1.  2.

  1. Bowl - Pocahantus Cook

  2. Bowl - Laughing Water


The Pamunkey Indians were the most powerful of the tribes in the great Powhatan Confederacy which consisted of approximately 32 to 34 tribes with some 10,000 people under the leadership of Chief Powhatan. His territory encompassed the entire coastal plain from the North Carolina border area to Washington D.C. The Chief and his famous daughter Pocahontas lived among the Pamunkey. The Pamunkey are exceedingly proud of their history and enjoy telling how bravely their ancestors resisted the encroachment of the white settlers. The Pamunkeys have the distinction of being one of the tribes east of the Mississippi who have practiced the art of pottery-making continuously since aboriginal times. The tribe of approximately 100 persons is located on the King William County Pamunkey Indian Reservation near Lester Manor, Virginia.

Powhatan History  

By Dr. Helen C. Rountree

When Europeans and Africans began arriving in what is now Virginia, they met Indian people from three linguistic backgrounds. Most of the coastal plain was inhabited by an Algonquian empire, today collectively known as Powhatan. The southwestern coastal plain was occupied by Iroquoians, the Nottoways and Meherrins. The piedmont was home to two Siouan confederacies, the Monacans and the Mannahoacs. The Virginia mountains, by A.D. 1600, were hunting territory to many peoples and home to few.

The first permanent European settlement, in 1607, was English. English colonies were agricultural, having little of the French emphasis on trading or the Spanish one on mining, militarism and missionizing. The Virginia Indians were therefore soon embroiled in a competition for space -- one which they lost gradually as more Englishmen and Africans came. Although there was fighting at times, the Indians were not so much conquered militarily as as they were flooded out.

The process occurred first on the coastal plain, where by 1700 there were only a handful of tiny Algonquian-speaking islands, and one Iroquoian one, left in a sea of English-speakers. By 1790 only four Algonquian reservations (Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Nansemond, and Gingaskin) and an Iroquoian one (Nottoway) were left. Some of the tribes that lost reservations went on living together nearby, becoming ancestors of the modern "citizen" tribes (Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock); others dispersed. In the piedmont, the Siouan tribes saw the handwriting on the wall and withdrew southward, sometimes returning and then leaving again. Non-Indians poured freely into their territory. After the Tuscarora War (1715-16), some Siouans went north with the Tuscarora. Others drifted back into Virginia, less as tribes than as families, and settled in the piedmont and along the Blue Ridge. The population of all of these groups was too small to maintain their languages, even on the reservations. The native tongues of Virginia were practically dead by 1800, none of them having been adequately recorded. The Indians' traditional cultures changed slowly and without direct interference (the Virginia English were not great missionizers), and by 1800 even the reservation people were much Anglicized.

Virginia was a "slave" state before the Civil War and a "Jim Crow" state after it. Indian tribes were neither "superior" whites nor "subservient" blacks. Their anomalous position kept them under continual fire until the Civil Rights Era. Everyone seemed to want them to disappear. In 1792 the Nansemonds sold their reservation. The Nottoway and Gingaskin reservations were terminated soon after -- the Gingaskin being the first true termination in the U.S. (1813). The Pamunkeys/Mattaponis nearly lost their land and tribal status in the 1840's. The "citizen" Indians lay low for most of the period. When anthropologists James Mooney and Frank Speck began working in Virginia (1890's-1920's), some groups reconstituted themselves in a way that was legal and hard for hostile non-Indians to obstruct: they organized as chartered corporations (Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock).

The two surviving reservations have always had recognition from the state, though not the federal government since their treaty (dated 1677) is with the Colony of Virginia. They have mixed feelings about federal recognition now that they can get it. The incorporated "citizen" tribes won through to state recognition in 1983, inspiring the Nansemond families to organize and gain recognition the next year. The Siouan-descended Amherst County Indians followed suit, though more slowly, taking the name of some of their probable ancestors, the Monacan. However, further advance to federal recognition is problematic for the "citizen" groups, due to the scarcity of records kept about non-reservation Indians and the burning of many Virginia archives during the Civil War. Meanwhile, all the groups benefit from the federal funds for education and community development that are available today. They are more prosperous now than they have been since the aliens came.