People first arrived on the North American continent late in the Pleistocene. There is considerable debate in light of new evidence about just when and from whence the first colonists came onto the continent. The conventional picture has been that peoples from eastern Siberia crossed the Bering Land Bridge into Alaska 15-20,000 years ago. (Newer evidence suggests a much earlier date and a crossing from Asia to the Americas by boat.) The Bering Land Bridge consisted of land exposed by the lowered sea levels of glacial periods and was vegetated with a cold grassland called the steppe tundra. Nothing quite like this plant cover exists today, but it appears to have provided good grazing and browsing for the large mammals (the megafauna) characteristic of the Pleistocene of the northern continents: mammoths, mastodons, musk oxen, giant bison, wild horses and such. The assumption has been that hunting peoples from northeastern Asia pursued their prey into Alaska; and as the ice sheets melted and provided a passage southward into the rest of the Americas, these big-game hunters became the first inhabitants of North, Central, and South America.

Across North America the big-game hunters are known as the Paleo-Indians. They had entered Virginia by at least 12,000 BP, where they encountered an open spruce forest full of large game animals. We know of their presence by the fluted stone points known as Clovis points that occur across the state. (The name Clovis derives from an archaeological site in New Mexico, where the points were first described.) There were major concentrations of these points in Dinwiddie County, near Front Royal in Warren County, and in the Saltville Valley in Smyth County.

Since most of the plant species in spruce woodlands yield little by way of food products for humans, it is presumed that the Paleo-Indians' main resource was the megafauna. These people were likely nomadic with only temporary camps established in areas where game was likely to congregate or pass such as near watering holes, salt pans, or game trails.

Paleo-Indians lived in Virginia during a time of climatic and vegetation change at the transition between Pleistocene and Holocene. Their culture, their way-of-life, continued until the largest mammals went extinct, sometime between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago. It is quite possible that these Clovis hunters contributed to the demise of the animals they hunted. Large animals reproduce very slowly, and it does not take a great deal of hunting pressure to tip the balance between death rates and birth rates in favor of the former, a dynamic no population can survive. There is some evidence that the forest closed before it shifted northward in response to warming climates. This could have resulted from the loss of mastodons and ground sloths, browsing animals which may have played a significant role in keeping the original Pleistocene forest open. Loss of clearings with grasses and small shrubs palatable to the grazing animals would have negatively impacted grazing animals and, along with hunting, resulted in their extinction as well.

The end of the Paleo-Indian Period came around 9,000 years ago. The large mammals were gone, and the spruce forest was gone, replaced by a temperate broadleaf deciduous forest with a wealth of foodstuffs for human beings. If Paleo-Indians did play a role in the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna, they were only the first of many human groups to leave an imprint on this land. Their mark is what cannot be seen here, rather than a visible new feature on the landscape.

The Archaic Period followed the Paleo-Indian Period and flourished from 9,000 to 3,000 years ago. The peoples of this time in the eastern forests of North America were generalized hunters and gatherers, collecting a wide array of plant materials and both aquatic and terrestrial animal products for their subsistence. In a few places along the east coast of North America large mounds of mussel, oyster, or conch shells from their collecting and feasting persist, but most have been destroyed. Many were probably flooded by the rising sea levels of this time; others were mined by later peoples as a source of hard fragments for road and building construction. The largest still existing is Turtle Mound, near Cape Canaveral on the east cost of Florida. It rises 35 feet above sea level.

Archaic people are important because of some of their innovations. From the perspective of the geographer interested in landscape development, their most important novelty was horticulture: the domestication and use of some native plant species, among them sunflower and chenopods (goosefoot). (Anthropologists find equally interesting Archaic beginnings to practices of burying the dead and making pottery.) Archaic peoples may have divided their year among seasonal camps near their crops and sources of shellfish and temporary winter camps as they pursued game animals in the forest.

The last period of Native American cultural dominance is known as the Woodland Period. This began in the eastern part of the continent about 3,000 years ago with the introduction of crop species that originated in Mexico, namely maize, beans, and squashes. These three crops (actually there were many varieties of each), eaten together, provided most of the essential nutrients. When supplemented with hunting and fishing for a source of animal protein, these crops permitted a dependence on agriculture and contributed to the establishment—presumably for the first time—of permanent or semi-permanent settlements.

When Europeans first made contact with eastern North America, tribes representing three distinct language families inhabited what is today Virginia. These families were the Algonkian (or Algonquian), Siouan, and Iroquoian. There was a distinct spatial pattern to their settlement. This will be discussed below.

Algonkian-speaking peoples occupied the Coastal Plain north of the Chowan drainage basin. This was the most densely populated region of Virginia at this time. People depended upon agriculture (maize, beans, and squash) and lived in some 161 permanent or semi-permanent villages located on the banks of the major streams. Each village had from 2-50 houses. At least some were palisaded.

                                    This famous rendering of an Algonkian village along the coast of North Carolina by John White in the late 1500s gives an idea of what villages on Virginia's coastal plain looked like.

Like most Woodland Indians, the natives of the coastal plain practiced a type of shifting or "slash and burn" agriculture. It is quite possible they also had some permanent plots on the floodplains of non-tidal streams similar to those that supported the Mississippian peoples of the interior. The typical agriculture practices associated with shifting agriculture involve clearing a patch of woodland, planting it with maize, beans, and squashes intermingled on the same plot, and then after a few years when weeds take over and soil fertility declines, abandoning that plot and opening a new patch of forest. "Slash and burn" refers to the method of clearing the forest patch. First trees would be girdled (slashed) to kill them. Once vegetation was dead and dried out, it was burned. The ash contained the nutrients formerly bound up in the leaves and branches and served as fertilizer for the agricultural plot just created. Since these people had no domesticated animals (like oxen, horses, or mules) to pull plows, they didn't need to clear off stumps before planting. Using hoes constructed of large clam shells and digging sticks, they could easily plant around any debris left from the trees. Native American agricultural plots thus looked very different from the typical West European plot in which every obstacle to a plow had to be removed and which was planted to a single crop, wheat being the dominant foodstuff.

Algonkian-speaking tribes had, contrary to modern myth, pretty much decimated the wild game near their villages. Annual fall deer hunts took place near the Fall Line, where there were no settlements and the game was therefore not depleted. Fire drives were a common tactic to bring deer to the hunters. These burns would have cleared much of the undergrowth from the forest floor and left a forest unlike today's wall of greenery.

At the time of English settlement, Algonkian people were politically organized into what has become known as the Powhatan Confederacy. Tribes paid allegiance to a single leader, Powhatan, through tribute and military service. These people were the first to encounter directly the English settlers and quickly fell victim to their diseases and appetite for land. Some lands were reserved for Native Americans in the 1600s, but only two reservations remain, the 125 acres of the Mattaponi (established in 1658) and the 800 acres of the Pamunkey (established 1677). They contain to pay tribute to the principal chief of the Commonwealth in a ritual at Thanksgiving time when deer are brought to the Governor.

 The Piedmont Plateau of Virginia was inhabited by Sioux-speaking peoples. Also agricultural people, they are less well known than the Algonkians of the Coastal Plain. They had little direct contact with early English settlers who could have left a written record of their villages and way of life before they were altered and destroyed. They may have had less permanent settlements than the coastal plain natives and thus may have resulted in less of archaeological record. One group of Siouan people who achieved some significance during the Colonial Period were the Occaneechi, who lived on islands in the Roanoke River near the modern VA-NC line. They became middlemen in trade between the English settlements around the Chesapeake Bay and the Native Americans in the Carolinas. Today Occaneechi State Park marks the location of their villages.

Effort is underway to locate the sites of Monacan and other Siouan peoples' villages. As archaeological digs proceed our knowledge of these peoples will grow.

Iroquoian-speaking people lived in two widely separated parts of Virginia at the time of Contact. The Nottoway and Meherrin were among the tribes living in the Chowan Drainage Basin and majot tributaries to the Chowan bear their name today. Indications are that these people lived much as the Algonkians of the Coastal Plain. Like many Iroquoian groups, they had a reputation as fierce warriors, one thing that allowed them to hold onto their lands longer than their neighbors to the north.

The other Iroquoian-speaking peoples in Virginia were the Cherokee. Their villages and agricultural lands were in the vicinity of the Great Smoky Mountains in today's North Carolina and Tennessee. However, southwestern Virginia was part of their hunting territory, and their claim to that land was recognized by others.

In many ways, the Iroquois most significant in the historical geography of settlement in Virginia were those who lived far to the north around the shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The Onondaga, the Mohawk, the Seneca, the Oneida and the Cayhuga were organized into the so-called Iroquois Confederacy. Powerful, warlike people, they sent frequent war parties south through the Great Valley and across the Piedmont to fight with worthy adversaries like the Creeks. Because of the presence of their warriors, the Valley of Virginia apparently was a no man's land at the time of European Contact. Later these northern Iroquois were to force the Sioux out of the Piedmont toward the end of the 17th Century, leaving the area ripe for European colonization. Later, Virginians would force the Iroquois out of the Valley. 

Traces of the original settlers of Virginia are difficult to find. Place names are an obvious contribution, as many natural features bear the names either given them by the first people or in reference to these people. Names of other things unfamiliar to the English, like opossum and raccoon, also bear witness to an earlier people.

Their foodstuffs have become mainstays of the American diet. Especially in the southern diet corn and beans make up many traditional dishes.

The footpaths of Native Americans in many instances continue to be major thoroughfares across the state. For example, the Great Warrior's Path through the Valley of Virginia, became (in part) the Wildnerness Road of pioneers going west, then the Great Wagon Road, the Valley Turnpike, US Rte. 11 and now Interstate 81. US 1 and I-85 follow the path of the Occaneechi Trail; I-64 parallels the Pamunkey-New River Trail, and US 460 the trail between the Appomatuck villages and Roanoke.

There is a resurgence in interest in Native American culture, long overshadowed by Virginia's interest in her Colonial and Civil War history. As we learn more, we will undoubtedly come to appreciate more of the contributions of these original Virginians.