Virginia students have been taught for generations that the Shenandoah Valley was essentially uninhabited when European settlers arrived, a convenient story that helped justify what happened next. Carole Nash, Director of the Environmental Archaeology Laboratory at James Madison University, has spent much of her career challenging that narrative with evidence rather than sentiment.
“So folks would look at the Valley Road Route 11 and talk about the Valley Road as though it was the warrior path, and that there were Iroquois or Haudenosaunee who were coming down through the valley and were controlling this territory — and that completely renders invisible the native people who were here,” Nash told WHSV in 2024. The invisibility, she argued, was not accidental. European settlers benefited from the idea that the Valley was empty, and the colonial record was shaped accordingly.
A Presence Dating Back 15,000 Years
Nash’s research, which builds on decades of archaeological work and a 2020 paper titled “Native American Communities of the Shenandoah Valley: Constructing a Complex History,” documents indigenous occupation of this region stretching back approximately 15,000 years, to the end of the last Ice Age. The earliest inhabitants were Archaic-period people who moved through the Valley seasonally, hunting large and small game and gathering wild foods. By the Woodland Period, communities had developed more settled patterns organized around cultivated food sources and increasingly complex relationships with neighboring groups.
The Monacan Nation, whose ancestral territory extended across western Virginia including the Blue Ridge and much of the Shenandoah Valley, traces its roots back roughly 10,000 years in this landscape. The Monacan are an Eastern Siouan-speaking people, closely related linguistically to neighboring tribes including the Manahoac, who occupied territory along the Rappahannock and its western tributaries, the Occaneechi, the Saponi, and the Tutelo. Sacred burial mounds, dating from roughly 1000 to 1400 A.D., are scattered across the Shenandoah Valley as lasting, physical markers of their presence; Nash has described these as “above-ground cemeteries, very sacred places.”
The Manahoac and the Colonial Catastrophe
The Manahoac people, who appear on colonial-era maps occupying territory between the Blue Ridge and the Piedmont east of it, met their end through violent destruction. Virginia colonial records document a pattern of armed slave-raiding by rival tribes armed with English weapons in the mid-to-late 1660s, raids that devastated Siouan-speaking villages in the interior. By 1669, the Manahoac presence had been reduced to a handful of survivors, and they disappear from the documentary record entirely by 1728, according to research on Virginia’s indigenous history.
Treaties negotiated between European colonial governments and the Iroquois Confederacy during the early 18th century further erased local peoples from official awareness. Those agreements transferred land claims and hunting rights, but did not include the local Siouan-speaking tribes who had actually occupied the territory, leaving the Monacan and their neighbors without legal standing in land negotiations that determined their own homelands.
The Shawnee and the 18th-Century Valley
The Shawnee, an Algonquian-speaking people whose range covered much of the Ohio River Valley and extended into the southern Appalachians, maintained a presence in the Shenandoah Valley in the period of early European settlement. A band of Shawnee was living near present-day Winchester when the first English settlement was established in the area in 1744; the band departed roughly around that time. The relationship between Shawnee communities in the Ohio River Basin and the Valley settlers that followed was repeatedly violent: border warfare and raids marked the years from roughly 1754 through the early 1770s, a conflict running parallel to the French and Indian War and its aftermath that shaped the region’s early European character as much as any other single factor.
The Monacan Nation Today
The Monacan are not a historical relic. The Monacan Indian Nation, now centered in Amherst County in the piedmont foothills east of Lynchburg, has an enrolled membership of roughly 1,600 to 2,000 people and is one of six Virginia tribes recognized by the federal government. The tribe’s ancestral museum, located in a former Episcopal church building that was designed to serve indigenous people, began collecting artifacts after the Episcopal Diocese returned 75 acres of land to the Nation in 1995. It remains one of the few places where the long history of Siouan-speaking peoples in this part of Virginia is formally preserved and interpreted.
Buried in Plain Sight
The burial mounds Nash references don’t announce themselves. They’ve weathered centuries, been built over, farmed around, and in some cases deliberately obscured. The Valley’s indigenous history has never entirely disappeared; it’s encoded in place names, embedded in the archaeological record beneath farm fields, and carried forward by communities like the Monacan that have survived everything the colonial and post-colonial record tried to do to them.
The name Shenandoah itself is indigenous in origin, derived from a word from the language of the people who lived here long before any road ran through the Valley or any county was carved out of it. The precise translation is debated by linguists, but the presence it records is not.
Carole Nash’s research on Native American communities in the Shenandoah Valley is available through the James Madison University Libraries. The Monacan Indian Nation’s ancestral museum is open to visitors in Amherst, Virginia. Further information on the Monacan Nation is available at monacannation.gov.