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Social Memory, Persistent Place, And Depositional Practice At The Hand Site (44sn22) In Southeastern Virginia, Taylor Blair Triplett

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The Hand site is a complex Native American village site located on the Nottoway River in southeastern Virginia. Intensive excavations in the 1960s identified over 600 archaeological features, including hearths, pits, structural remains, and a complex of human and canine burials, long assumed to date to the Protohistoric period. While previous researchers emphasized the site’s ties to the colonial actors, a reexamination of the collection instead suggests the site was a geographic locus for Indigenous peoples for over a thousand years. A close attention to chronology as well as space speaks to a deep history of emplacement, whereby social memory …