Anthropology professor’s research aims to illuminate the deep history of Native societies in the Chesapeake
As a specialist in the archaeology of the Native peoples of the Chesapeake, Martin Gallivan, professor of anthropology at William & Mary, is committed to helping transform his discipline’s approach to Indigenous history.
Earlier generations of archaeologists tended to portray the deep past prior to European contact as a succession of static phases. Change, according to this view, was at best rare during what used to be called America’s “prehistory.” But new findings and old Indigenous memories tell a different, far more dynamic story — one that Gallivan and his research partner, anthropology doctoral candidate Taylor Callaway M.A. ’20, seek to bring to the fore.
“What we’re trying to do is work toward a more eventful, historic understanding of the Native past,” Gallivan said. “A key tool for doing that is better chronology.”
Over the next several months, with the support of the Arts & Sciences Faculty Grants Fund, Gallivan, Callaway and a team of undergraduate interns will work to clarify the chronology of Native history in the Chesapeake through radiocarbon dating. This technique, a staple of the archaeological toolkit, enables researchers to determine the age of objects, and thus the timing of events, in the absence of written records.
At the center of the project is the transition to the use of shell-tempered ceramics (that is, pottery made with the addition of shell to clay to prevent shrinkage and cracking as it dries and is fired) across a broad swath of the Chesapeake region and as far north as the Delaware Valley. These ceramics, known as Mockley, emerged around 200 C.E. and correlate with the establishment of permanent communities that Gallivan terms Ancestral Chesapeake Society. Previous archaeologists suggested that the spread of this technology throughout Native communities of the Tidewater and surrounding areas of the Middle Atlantic was the result of a migration of Algonquian speakers southward along the Atlantic coast from the Northeast.
Gallivan and Callaway suspect that these scholars were incorrect. They have found that some of the earliest ceramics come not from the Northeast, but rather from the Lower Chesapeake, near the mouth of the James River. Their new hypothesis is that shell-tempering was a local invention that spread north instead of south. Taking advantage of the fact that ceramics survive well in the archaeological record, Gallivan’s team will combine radiocarbon dates for Mockley pottery with a statistical method known as Bayesian modeling to settle a longstanding debate in archaeology.
“I think it’s healthy for our field to occasionally revisit our assumptions as new data, theory and technology become available,” Callaway said.
Indeed, technology has already helped Callaway and Gallivan compellingly challenge old assumptions about the Mockley spread. Along with Brooke Spencer ’25, a double major in geology and anthropology who seized the opportunity to work in Gallivan’s Chesapeake Archaeology Laboratory (CAL), Callaway combed state archaeological databases for site records with dated Mockley ceramics, compiled artifact data and mapped relevant site locations using a geographic information system (GIS). Using this method to build a model of these ceramics’ likely earliest appearance and subsequent diffusion, Gallivan and Callaway were able to present highly suggestive evidence for their south-to-north hypothesis at the 2023 Southeastern Archaeological Conference.
For her part, Spencer credits this experience with inspiring her to declare anthropology as her secondary major and stay engaged in archaeological research. “I started in the spring of 2023 and have been in the lab every semester since and am now even working on my own senior thesis in the lab!” she said.
Undergraduate interns at CAL will play crucial roles at multiple stages of Gallivan’s ongoing project. He and Callaway plan to take a collections-based approach, producing new dates for organic materials — nut shells, corn cupules, oyster shells, animal bones — associated with Mockley pottery in existing archaeological collections. Their target will be a portion of the Eastern Shore in Maryland, a “critical portion of the landscape” for which radiocarbon dates are currently completely lacking, according to Gallivan. Having already reached out to the Maryland Historic Trust to request permission to collect samples from relevant collections, Gallivan will now rely on his team of undergraduates to consult the organization’s online site inventory to identify datable materials from sealed, undisturbed, subsurface contexts.
After the Maryland Historic Trust consults with Native stakeholders, Gallivan and Callaway will have the opportunity to work with artifacts in storage, and they hope to have their student research assistants accompany them and gain hands-on experience. The next step will be to send samples to the University of Georgia’s Center for Applied Isotopic Studies for dating. Once the data come in from the lab, undergraduates will once again serve a critical function by entering new and existing radiocarbon dates into statistical models that will build a more robust case for the likely sequence whereby Mockley ceramics spread through the Chesapeake.
“I want my students to understand that although cleaning an oyster shell with a toothbrush might seem tedious, this meticulous work reveals crucial chapters of Native history,” Gallivan said. “While the dates themselves are valuable, what truly matters is deciphering the social networks and cultural exchanges that these shell-tempered ceramics represent.”
By highlighting the interactions among Native groups that facilitated the spread of material culture, as well as the societal transformations those exchanges produced, Gallivan’s and Callaway’s work will help shatter stereotypes and promote a more collaborative relationship between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples in the present.
“Native communities have historically faced, and continue to face, significant pressure to conform to settler colonial ideas about authenticity, which often rest on very static notions of identity,” Callaway said. “One powerful contribution of archaeology is that it affirms the long-term dynamism of Native communities and the contingency of Middle Atlantic history.”
For Gallivan, using this project to advance his partnership with his colleagues in the Virginia Indian community is a priority. His efforts to understand the estuary- and river-oriented lifestyle of the Ancestral Chesapeake Society — one that differed from the cultural traditions that preceded it and whose legacy extends to the present — is an ongoing collaboration with an array of Native partners, including an Indigenous Advisory Board that his lab regularly consults. He plans to share the results of his current work with these partners in the hope that it will aid them in their own exploration of their ancestors’ deep past.
“We are thrilled that Professor Gallivan’s research will further William & Mary’s commitment to promoting inclusive scholarship and embracing Indigenous voices,” said Silvia R. Tandeciarz, A&S vice dean for social sciences & interdisciplinary studies. “We are even more excited to see students playing such active roles in this important work.”
