Another nail goes in the ignorant savage coffin.

When archaeologists began digging in a cornfield one steamy summer day on the banks of the York River, they were pretty sure they would find remnants of Werowo comoco, the legendary capital city chosen by Powhatan, the Algonquian paramount chief who once had the power to decide whether the settlers at Jamestown should live or starve.

But once the archaeologists began scraping test pits every 50 feet, what they began to unearth was unlike anything they had seen in the region. About 1,000 feet from the river, where they expected to find nothing at all, they found a line of darkly stained dirt where newer topsoil had filled in what at one time had been a long, straight ditch.

The ditch was so straight, so perfectly constructed, they figured it must have been the work of colonists who moved into the area with their more sophisticated metal tools and axes once the Indians had moved out. But the team found only native artifacts. Then radiocarbon testing showed that the ditch was built in the 13th century, 400 years before Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas’s fateful encounter with John Smith.

The ditches, archaeologist Martin Gallivan theorizes, are monuments, separating the sacred part of the city, where Powhatan and his priests lived, from the profane, where everyone else went about the business of daily life. These long-hidden ditches — Smith never mentioned them in his writings — are as important to understanding the Algonquian culture as the elaborate structures of the Inca or the white stone tributes to Jefferson and Lincoln on the Mall.

“There’s no place like Werowocomoco,” Gallivan said. For the Algonquians, for centuries the dominant tribe of Virginia’s Tidewater region, it was the ancient center of the universe

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