Kanawha Valley Fort Ancient people might be related to Sioux
During the 2009 annual meeting of the West Virginia Archaeological Society on Oct. 24 in South Charleston, three presenters gave talks containing evidence supporting a link between the Fort Ancient people and Siouan tribes.
SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Were the Shawnee, Cherokee, and other Native Americans who were encountered by European immigrants in the Kanawha and Ohio River valleys of southern and western West Virginia during the 1700s descendants of the prehistoric Indians who lived here centuries earlier?
While that's a common assumption, it may be more likely that native people of the Fort Ancient culture, who lived in stockade-encircled villages along the Ohio and Kanawha rivers from about 1000 to the mid-1600s, are more closely related to the Sioux.
During the 2009 annual meeting of the West Virginia Archaeological Society on Oct. 24 in South Charleston, three presenters gave talks containing evidence supporting a link between the Fort Ancient people and Siouan tribes. While the Siouan civilization is more commonly associated with the Great Plains, several branches, including the Tutelo, Saponi, Moneton and Occaneechi, are known to have lived in southwestern Virginia.
Since the fortified villages of the Fort Ancient people were abandoned when settlers arrived, there was no easy way to determine the culture's ethnic or linguistic identity.
"One of the big myths in West Virginia is the association of Fort Ancient sites with the Shawnee," said Robert Maslowski, the former chief archaeologist for the Huntington District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and now a member of the Marshall University Graduate College faculty.
Maslowski is currently working under contract with the National Park Service to review a University of Arizona Native American cultural affiliation study for the New River Gorge National River.
Among cultural differences between the Fort Ancient people and the Shawnee are burial practices, Maslowski said. In most cases, the Fort Ancient people are buried with their heads oriented to the east, while the Shawnee are most often buried with their heads to the west. The Fort Ancient people lived in villages surrounded by log stockades while the Shawnee lived in non-fortified, widely dispersed sites throughout the east, he added.
Darla Spencer of Cultural Resources Analysts of Teays Valley said that corncob impressions similar to those made on pottery produced by Siouan tribes in southwestern Virginia between 1400 and 1600 was produced during the same approximate period by Fort Ancient people in present-day West Virginia.
Corncob-imprinted vessels similar to those produced by the Siouan people of Virginia were found in large quantities at a Fort Ancient village at Burning Springs Branch, excavated prior to the construction of the new Marmet Locks navigation channel.
That discovery prompted archaeologists to take a second look a Fort Ancient pottery in the region that had previously been classified as having been imprinted with cord wrappings. A study of 9,000 pottery shards from Fort Ancient sites in the Kanawha and Ohio River valleys showed that 37 percent of them bore corncob impressions similar to those produced in the Siouan villages of Virginia.
"It adds weight to the idea of a Siouan occupation in Southern West Virginia" during the era of the Fort Ancient culture, Spencer said.
Robert Rankin, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Kansas, said the five Great Plains tribes of Sioux he has worked most closely with "have an oral tradition of having come from the Ohio Valley."
Rankin added that from a linguistic perspective, "the Tutelo of Virginia are more closely related to the Crows of Montana than the Catawbans" of the Carolinas.
The earliest recorded contact between European explorers and Native Americans in the Kanawha Valley took place in the early 1670s, when Gabriel Arthur, an indentured servant, visited a Moneton village with a group of Tomahittan Indians. The Moneton village is generally believed to have been along the Kanawha River, with Malden, St. Albans and Buffalo being mentioned as possible sites for its locale.
"Mone" means water, and "ton" means large, in Siouan, according to Rankin. "I think Siouan was spoken in the Kanawha Valley," Rankin said.
If it can be established that the Fort Ancient people of West Virginia's Ohio and Kanawha River valleys are related to the Sioux, it would change the way re-burials of disinterred remains from road and construction sites are handled. Officially recognized Siouan tribes would be consulted when remains from the Fort Ancient culture are unearthed.
