Marcey Creek and Native American Archeology in Arlington
Marcey Creek Ware was first defined by archaeologist Carl Manson in 1948 at the Marcey Creek site on the Potomac River in Arlington County, Virginia.
More than a dozen pre-history Native American sites have been found within Arlington County, eight along the shore of the Potomac River and three in the upper valley of Four Mile Run. They were all occupied at different times. The earliest traces of Native American sites in this area date from about 13,500 years ago.
Archaeologists have discovered and defined several ceramic wares that illustrate the early experimentation with temper and vessel shapes from the Woodland period (3,000 years ago). Archaeologist Carl Manson first defined Marcey Creek Ware in 1948 at the Marcey Creek site on the Potomac River in Arlington County. It was tempered with 25-to-50 percent soapstone.
“The Marcey Creek site was a small village, occupied by a sedentary people for sufficient time to enable the soil to increase in thickness as much as 23 inches,” Mason wrote in 1948 in Cambridge University Press’s journal American Antiquity. “The depth of the culture-bearing layers, the crudeness of the stone artifacts, the absence of organic material, and the complete absence of pipes indicates a greater antiquity for this site than for any other thus far excavated in the Potomac Valley.”
The ware was hand-modeled on a flat base, which often bears impressions of the open-weave mat the vessel sat on during its creation. The vessels are rectangular or oval shallow bowls with curved to straight sides, and lug handles at the ends. The ware is found in small quantities throughout the Virginia coastal plain, along the James and Potomac rivers in the Piedmont, and in the Shenandoah Valley north of Port Republic.
The Native peoples of the Chesapeake Bay region were among the first in the Western Hemisphere to encounter European explorers and colonists. On June 16, 1608, Englishman Captain John Smith and fourteen other men from the Jamestown colony entered the Potomac River aboard a two-ton open barge and explored upriver as far as the Great Falls. Along the way, Smith recorded many native villages, which he later included on his Map of Virginia.
The first three villages below the falls, on the right bank of the Potomac, were located on lands now part of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The names of these villages, as heard by Smith and spelled in Elizabethan English, were Namoraughquend, Assaomeck, and Namassingakent. Translated from Eastern Algonquian into English, they mean "fishing place," "middle fishing place," and "fish - plenty of." The "fishing place" village was probably between present-day Theodore Roosevelt Island and the Pentagon. A historical marker is located there.
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