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One of the more enigmatic events in the histoTy of European colonization in the New World is the generally tolerant reception the Jamestown colonists received in 1607 from Powhatan, the paramount chiefof the Powhatan people of Tidewater Virginia. Understanding that event requires an anthropological study of the complex sociopolitical relations between the coastal Powhatan and the less-well-known interior cultures of the native world. This article is primarib concerned with describing one such interior culture, the Monacan, a people who ethnohistoric texts suggest were less complex than, and a princ@al enemy oJ; the Powhatan. Analysis of those texts, and inrights derivedjom archeology, provide a picture of the Monacan that leads to a dzfferent perspective on the context of the Jamestown settlement, and on relations ofpower between indigenous cultures in the precontact world.676 Hantman] RECONSTRUCTING MONACAN CULTURE AND HISTORY677

Recent excavation and analysis of the remaining section of the endangered Rapidan Mound site (44OR1) in the central Virginia Piedmont provide new insights into a unique complex of burial mounds in the Virginia interior. Known since Thomas Jefferson's eighteenth-century description, the mounds are both earth and stone and accretional earthen mounds. Thirteen are recorded, all dating to the late prehistoric and early contact era (ca. A.D. 900-1700). Typically containing few artifacts, the accretional mounds are unusual in North America in the numbers of individuals interred, more than one thousand in at least two cases, and in the nature of the secondary, collective burial ritual that built up the mounds over centuries. Following a review of the characteristics of the mound complex, we focus on the Rapidan Mound and the analysis of the collective, secondary burial features in the mound. Precise provenience information and bioarchaeological analyses of two large and intact collective burial features provide new information on health and diet, and several lines of evidence for demographic reconstruction. Finally, we discuss the mortuary ritual conducted at the mounds within the cultural and historical context of the region.

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