The protohistoric period of the state of West Virginia in the United States began in the mid-sixteenth century with the arrival of European trade goods. Explorers and colonists brought these goods to the eastern and southern coasts of North America and were brought inland by native trade routes. This was a period characterized by increased intertribal strife, rapid population decline, the abandonment of traditional life styles, and the extinction and migrations of many Native American groups.
Written accounts of the area begin by the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century with the scattered documentation and journals of early explorers. These accounts frequently portray a sparsely inhabited area, possibly due to the Iroquois wars to monopolize the European fur trade or the devastating effects of new diseases introduced by Europeans.
Archaeological cultures
During the climatic warming of the Medieval Warm Period (900–1200 CE), the introduction of the bow and arrow and maize led many Late Woodland period groups in Eastern and Southern North America to develop sedentary agriculture based societies, which lead to larger populations.
The harsh droughts and cold winters during the Little Ice Age (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries), put these larger groups under severe social stress as they competed for scarcer resources, such as less timber, less fertile farm land and fewer game animals. These groups were already unstable when Europeans arrived during the sixteenth century with superior weapons and diseases to which the native populations had no resistance. Many of these groups are now only known through the archaeological record.
Fort Ancient and Monongahela
Groups of the Fort Ancient and Monongahela cultures lived in the western part of the state (and in the adjoining states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio and Kentucky) along the Ohio River and its tributaries. Late Fort Ancient (1400 to 1750) and Late Monongahela (1580 to 1635) peoples began consolidating their villages into larger settlements with more defensive measures such as wooden palisades during this time. Archaeologists suggest that this means that intergroup strife had increased, with the smaller settlements amalgamating into larger entities for mutual protection. These cultures were very similar and were both influenced by Mississippian cultures to their south and west. Exotic trade items from the Mississippian regions have been found in excavated Fort Ancient and Monongahela villages. These items include shell gorgets from Eastern Tennessee, a head pot similar to those produced in the Central Mississippi Valley by the peoples of the Middle Mississippian Parkin and Nodena phases, and pottery with motifs and decoration methods connected with Angel phase sites in the Lower Ohio Valley. Such items made their way into this region through long established native trade routes.
European items were deposited into the archaeological record at sites such as Lower Shawneetown and Hardin Village in nearby Greenup County, Kentucky and the Buffalo, Rolf Lee and Clover sites in Putnam, Mason and Cabell Countys in West Virginia, which have all produced European metal objects dated after 1550. These objects came from Spanish, French, and English explorers who had begun to explore the eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast of the present United States by the sixteenth century.
One such expedition that left objects in the archaeological record was the de Soto Entrada of the early 1540s, which encountered many Late Mississippian groups. This expedition spent almost four years trekking from Florida up to the eastern Tennessee region, down through Alabama, across Mississippi to Eastern Arkansas, through Northern Louisiana and into Texas, before doubling back to Arkansas and down the Mississippi to Mexico by way of the Gulf of Mexico. These groups were extinct by the time Europeans colonized West Virginia, either becoming victims of European diseases, which at times had as much as a 90% death rate among Native American populations, or migrating to other areas to avoid intergroup warfare such as the Iroquois wars to control the fur trade.
The Franquelin map of Ohio also shows an unidentified tribe labelled the "Casa" as existing roughly in the region of what is now Ohio which was once occupied by the Monongahela.louis, franquelin, jean baptiste. "Franquelin's map of Louisiana.". LOC.gov. Retrieved August 17, 2017. It's possible that this name could be connected to them. Archaeology has also shown odd traits among the people, such as domestication of turkeys & the building of stone walls across certain mountain valleys."Mystery Walls on Armstrong Mountain", West Virginia Hillbilly, December 7, 1989, West Virginia Division of Culture and History Loup Creek wall, "Trees of all sizes and varieties may be seen growing up through the heaps of loose stones which were once built into the wall. One of these which I particularly noticed was a red oak fully three feet in diameter and not less than four hundred years old. This would indicate that the wall had been abandoned at least that long if not longer. The mystery to be solved is who were the builders of this wall and why was it constructed. William Morris the first permanent settler of the county located in the vicinity of this wall in 1774 and his descendants claim that he was told by the Indians that the wall was there when the latter came into the Valley. It is quite clear to every inquiring mind that the Indians were not its builders but that it was no doubt constructed by the same race that built the mounds and inhabited the territory of the United States for centuries prior to its settlement by the Indians." Quote from George Wesley Atkinson, 1876 (Public Domain), Page 94, "History of Kanawha County: from its organization in 1789 until the present". The uses of the walls are unknown, but they may have been used to control movement through the regions & seem to have also been used as traps to pen in and slaughter Forest Buffalo & other large game, according to a great deal of animal bones found at such sites.
Archaeology seems to show an influx of Siouan speaking people into the region forcing them to the northernmost reaches of their territory during the 15th & 16th centuries Richard L. George, Revisiting the Monongahela Linguistic/Cultural Affiliation Mystery, ABSTRACT, Pennsylvania Archeology Society. Note: where George says "Algonquin," read "Algonquian." and a possible union with the Fort Ancient culture to the west.Jones 1987 See also Shenandoah.
Historic groups
This region was inhabited by members of several different major language families when Europeans first arrived. These groups shared similar cultures, but spoke languages that had diverged from each other over thousands of years. Archaeological cultures such as the Monongahela and Fort Ancient groups may have been confederacies whose constituent members did not all speak a common language instead of individual tribes or communities. The major language groups inhabiting the West Virginia region were the Central Algonquian, Iroquoian and Ohio Valley Siouan.
In the seventeenth century, Native Americans groups had not yet formed the large political "tribes" known from the historical era during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and many tribal names used in historical literature do not apply in the seventeenth century. Many tribal names were actually amalgamations of earlier groups that had been decimated by wars and disease and banded together for mutual safety. Groups were also known by many different names, which also made identifying specific groups difficult. Group names were often recorded before the group met Europeans, and was frequently the name that enemies knew them by and in a different language family from what the group themselves spoke. These names were then transliterated into several European written languages, particularly French, English, Dutch, and Spanish. These European languages often had different phonetic stylings for the foreign languages of the Native Americans, and this translation and transliteration was conducted in an era before many modern writing conventions, resulting in inconsistent spelling, grammar and alphabetic characters.
Algonquian groups The Algonquian peoples were one of the most populous and widespread North American native language groups, with tribes originally numbering in the hundreds. They were most concentrated in the New England region. The Central Algonquian languages are a subgroup of the Algonquian family, itself a member of the Algic language family. The languages are grouped together because they were spoken near each other, not because they are any closer related to one another than to any other Algonquian language. Within the Central Algonquian grouping, the only languages known to be more closely related to each other than to any other Algonquian languages are Potawatomi and Ojibwe. However, there is some evidence for a larger subbranch "Eastern Great Lakes" or "Core Central", consisting of Ojibwe-Potawatomi, Miami-Illinois, Fox-Sauk-Kickapoo, and Shawnee, and excluding Cree-Montagnais and Menominee. At the time of the European arrival, the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy was regularly at war with its Algonquian neighbours and forced other tribes out of Iroquois-occupied territories.
Shawnee
This tribe, known variously as the Shawnee, Chaouanon, Shaawanwaki, Shaawanooki, Shaawanowi lenaweeki, Sawanogi, Sawanons and Savanoa, was one of the more mobile of the tribes encountered by early European explorers. They occupied areas Delaware and Pennsylvania to the Ohio Valley region in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, the Cumberland River region of Central Tennessee, and in Georgia, where the Savannah River is named for them. The tribe consisted of a number of autonomous subdivisions known as "septs" who shared a common language and culture: the Mekoche, Pekowi, Chalahgawtha, Hathawekela and Kispoko. This tribe may have been indigenous to the West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky area and could be descendants of the Fort Ancient or Monangahela cultures. Some protohistoric Shawnee villages have been found at locations that were former Fort Ancient sites, such as Lower Shawneetown. Their mobile lifestyle may have been due to being driven from their ancestral homelands by the Iroquois Confederacy. They are usually described as being in a near constant state of war with the Iroquois Confederacy, who were making inroads during the protohistoric period into the Ohio Valley region in a bid to control the fur trade. The Shawnee, under Tecumseh, sided with the British during the War of 1812 and were removed to the west of the Mississippi River after the war.