THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, May 28, 1996 TAG: 9605280087
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: KING WILLIAM LENGTH: 55 lines
If the Army Corps of Engineers gives its approval, a 6-mile long reservoir will supply Newport News, Williamsburg and York County with valuable drinking water.
But an archaeological company says it also will cover 2,200 acres of wetlands and 8,000 years of history.
Environmentalists already had questioned the impact of drawing 75 million gallons of water a day from the Mattaponi River and flooding 524 acres of environmentally valuable swamp and wetlands. Now Delaware-based MAAR Associates and the Pamunkey Indian tribe want the public to know about the area's historic importance.
``What's bothering me is, no one's paying any attention to the historic stuff,'' said G. Warren Cook, assistant chief of the Pamunkey Indians in King William County.
The tribe is descended from the powerful Powhatan Confederacy, which ruled the Virginia coastal plains Indians at the time of the Jamestown Settlement. The most famous member of that group was Pocahontas.
The Indians and the archaeological company said the reservoir would drown all 112 campsites and bivouacs they found last summer while exploring the Cohoke Swamp in King William County.
The sites are valuable, they said, because early hunters and gatherers left stone tools, pot fragments, fire-cracked rock and quartz arrow points that could provide clues about life in Virginia from 8,000 years ago through the early 17th century, including the ``contact period'' in which local Indians and the English settlers intermingled.
The archaeologists said that is one of the least understood of all the Indian epochs.
In addition, some sites are thought to date from the Early Woodland period of 1200 B.C. to 300 A.D., a time of swift population growth and cultural change among the Indians, who were also developing and refining clay pottery.
Cook and MAAR found more than 360 pottery pieces when they shoveled out thousands of ``test pits'' in a preliminary survey of the area last summer.
Ronald Thomas, MAAR president, said 54 of the sites are ``potentially significant camps.''
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources is reviewing MAAR's report and is expected to decide in a couple of weeks how many sites warrant further study.
``We respect the resource and we'd like to do it right,'' said Donald Rice, water-resources engineer for Newport News Waterworks. ``We want to be in full compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act.'' ILLUSTRATION: ASSOCIATED PRESS
G. Warren Cook, assistant chief of the Pamunkey Indians, examines an
800-year-old campsite in King William County. The tribe wants to
protect such sites from a proposed reservoir. by CNB