History
Based on archaeological evidence, scholars estimate that various distinct cultures of Native Americans occupied this part of the mid-Atlantic coast for more than 10,000 years before European contact. Evidence has been collected by archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. Varying indigenous cultures lived in the areas later occupied by the historic Pamunkey.
The Pamunkey are part of the larger Algonquian-speaking language family. This was composed of a number of tribes who spoke variations of the same language, a language now mostly lost. By 1607 more than 30 tribes were tributaries of the Algonquian Powhatan Confederacy, of which the Pamunkey were the largest. They were one of the most powerful tribes. Powhatan and his daughter Matoaka (Pocahontas), who achieved historical fame, were Pamunkey Indians. She married a Patawomeck named Kocoum three years before Captain Samuel Argall kidnapped her as a hostage in an attempt to secure the release of some English prisoners and ammunitions held by her father.
Read more about this topic: Pamunkey
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)