The Virginia Peninsula is located in southeast Virginia , bounded by the York River , James River , Hampton Roads and Chesapeake Bay . It is sometimes known as the Lower Peninsula to distinguish it from two other peninsulas to the north, the Middle Peninsula and the Northern Neck .
50-783: The Warwick Line (also known as the Warwick–Yorktown line ) was a defensive works across the Virginia Peninsula maintained along the Warwick River by Confederate General John B. Magruder against much larger Union forces under General George B. McClellan during the American Civil War in 1861–62. The main line extended 12 miles from Yorktown to the Warwick River and downstream to Lee's Mill, then westward to Skiffe's Creek, which flowed into
100-561: A paramount chief . Complex chiefdoms have two or even three tiers of political hierarchy . Nobles are clearly distinct from commoners and do not usually engage in any form of agricultural production. The higher members of society consume most of the goods that are passed up the hierarchy as a tribute. Reciprocal obligations are fulfilled by the nobles carrying out rituals that only they can perform. They may also make token, symbolic redistributions of food and other goods. In two- or three-tiered chiefdoms, higher-ranking chiefs have control over
150-525: A tribe or a band society , and less complex than a state or a civilization . Within general theories of cultural evolution, chiefdoms are characterized by permanent and institutionalized forms of political leadership (the chief ), centralized decision-making, economic interdependence, and social hierarchy. Chiefdoms are described as intermediate between tribes and states in the progressive scheme of sociopolitical development formulated by Elman Service : band - tribe - chiefdom - state . A chief's status
200-708: A central place for the Mississippian culture of North America. Pauketat's provocation, however, has been accused of not offering a sound alternative to the chiefdom type. For while he claims that chiefdoms are a delusion, he describes Cahokia as a civilization. This has been debated to uphold rather than challenge the evolutionary scheme he contests. Chiefdoms are characterized by the centralization of authority and pervasive inequality. At least two inherited social classes ( elite and commoner ) are present. (The ancient Hawaiian chiefdoms had as many as four social classes.) An individual might change social class during
250-530: A chiefdom in anthropology is by Robert L. Carneiro : "An autonomous political unit comprising a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief" (Carneiro 1981: 45). In archaeological theory , Service's definition of chiefdoms as “redistribution societies with a permanent central agency of coordination” (Service 1962: 134) has been most influential. Many archaeologists, however, dispute Service's reliance upon redistribution as central to chiefdom societies, and point to differences in
300-529: A complex social hierarchy consisting of kings, a warrior aristocracy, common freemen, serfs , and slaves . The Native American tribes sometimes had ruling kings or satraps (governors) in some areas and regions. The Cherokee, for example, had an imperial-family ruling system over a long period of history. The early Spanish explorers in the Americas reported on the Indian kings and kept extensive notes during what
350-438: A lifetime by extraordinary behavior. A single lineage/family of the elite class becomes the ruling elite of the chiefdom, with the greatest influence, power, and prestige. Kinship is typically an organizing principle, while marriage, age, and sex can affect one's social status and role. A single simple chiefdom is generally composed of a central community surrounded by or near a number of smaller subsidiary communities. All of
400-412: A manner as these two areas. The changes resulted in the two areas having Virginia's cities with the largest land areas and the most farming, even over 30 years after the consolidations in some instances. In 1960, the "Newport News–Hampton Metropolitan Statistical Area" was designated a metropolitan area by the U.S. Census Bureau. It comprised the cities of Newport News, Hampton and York County. In 1983,
450-622: A natural barrier behind which the defenders successfully held the Confederate capital, essentially prolonging the war for three more devastating years. As the region and Virginia rebuilt during Reconstruction , the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) under the leadership of Collis P. Huntington was completed from Richmond to the Ohio River by 1871. Long a dream of Virginians, and later sponsored by both Virginia and West Virginia,
500-497: A number of lesser ranking individuals, each of whom controls specific territory or social units. Political control rests on the chief's ability to maintain access to a sufficiently large body of tribute, passed up the line by lesser chiefs. These lesser chiefs in turn collect from those below them, from communities close to their own center. At the apex of the status hierarchy sits the paramount . Anthropologists and archaeologists have demonstrated through research that chiefdoms are
550-479: A number of political subdivisions which are now extinct, primarily due to both growth of communities and consolidation of local government (see section below). Many incorporated (formally constituted) localities have become legally void, though most have not been abandoned by their citizens, with the notable exception of Jamestown. Exclusive of towns which became cities and still have the same name, no less than 4 shires, 2 counties, 4 towns, and 1 city no longer exist in
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#1732772860670600-551: A population of about 1.8 million. The Hampton Roads MSA is the common name for the metropolitan area that surrounds the body of water of the same name. It is the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the Southeast and the 32nd largest in the United States. The land portion of Hampton Roads has been historically divided into two regions, the Virginia Peninsula or Peninsula on the north side, and South Hampton Roads on
650-685: A railroad, which had been newly developing technology beginning in the 1830s. In 1881, the Peninsula Extension of the C&;O was built from Richmond through Williamsburg to Newport News Point. There, Collis Huntington, his associates, and his Old Dominion Land Company developed his vision for the area. Within only 15 years, a rural farm community in Warwick County turned into the new independent city of Newport News, Virginia , by 1896 as new coal piers brought ships to what would become
700-541: A relatively unstable form of social organization. They are prone to cycles of collapse and renewal, in which tribal units band together, expand in power, fragment through some form of social stress, and band together again. An example of this kind of social organization were the Germanic Peoples who conquered the western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE . Although commonly referred to as tribes, anthropologists classified their society as chiefdoms. They had
750-538: A state-operated ferry system. These are: The Virginia Peninsula is home to several military bases. Langley Air Force Base is located in Hampton. Fort Monroe had been the oldest installation in the region but closed in September 2011. The now decommissioned Fort Wool , located on a manmade island called Rip Raps across the mouth of Hampton Roads from Fort Monroe, is also in Hampton. Fort Eustis , home of
800-428: Is a political organization of people represented or governed by a chief . Chiefdoms have been discussed, depending on their scope, as a stateless , state analogue or early state system or institution. Usually a chief's position is based on kinship , which is often monopolized by the legitimate senior members of select families or 'houses'. These elites can form a political-ideological aristocracy relative to
850-400: Is based on kinship , so it is inherited or ascribed , in contrast to the achieved status of Big Man leaders of tribes. Another feature of chiefdoms is therefore pervasive social inequality. They are ranked societies, according to the scheme of progressive sociopolitical development formulated by Morton Fried : egalitarian - ranked - stratified - state . The most succinct definition of
900-631: Is now called the conquest. Some of the native tribes in the Americas had princes, nobles, and various classes and castes. The " Great Sun " was somewhat like the Great Khans of Asia and eastern Europe. Much like an emperor, the Great Sun of North America is the best example of chiefdoms and imperial kings in North American Indian history. The Aztecs of Mexico had a similar culture. The Indus Valley Civilisation (3300 BCE - 1700 BCE)
950-729: Is the site of historic Jamestown , founded in 1607 as the first English settlement in North America. Geographically located at the northwestern reaches, Charles City and New Kent counties are part of the Virginia Peninsula. In the 21st century, they are also considered part of the Richmond–Petersburg region. The rest of the Virginia Peninsula is all part of the Virginia Beach–Norfolk–Newport News, VA–NC MSA ( metropolitan statistical area ) with
1000-559: The Apa Tanis as their ethnographic parallel (Berezkin 1995). Frantsouzoff (2000) finds a more developed example of such type of polities in ancient South Arabia in the Wadi Hadhramawt of the 1st millennium BCE . In Southeast Asian history up to the early 19th century, the metaphysical view of the cosmos called the mandala (i.e., circle) is used to describe a Southeast Asian political model , which in turn describes
1050-707: The American Civil War (1861–1865), the Union Army invaded the Virginia Peninsula as part of the Peninsula Campaign in 1862 to capture Richmond , beginning from Fort Monroe at the entrance to Hampton Roads, which had remained in Union control after Virginia seceded in 1861. At the outset of the Peninsula Campaign, the Battle of Hampton Roads between the first ironclad warships took place near
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#17327728606701100-590: The James River at Mulberry Island , where the line was anchored on the east by a four-gun battery at Mulberry Island Point. The south end of Mulberry Island (now part of Fort Eustis ) is located at the confluence of the Warwick and James Rivers. This article about the American Civil War is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Virginia -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Virginia Peninsula It
1150-550: The New World in 1565 at St. Augustine, Florida . It was the first founded by Europeans in what is now the United States. They established small Spanish outposts along the eastern coast into present-day Georgia and the Carolinas. The northernmost post was Santa Elena (today Port Royal, South Carolina ). From there Juan Pardo was commissioned to lead expeditions into the interior, founding Fort San Juan in 1567–1568 at
1200-846: The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is in Newport News. A major military contractor, Newport News Shipbuilding , is also in the city. York County is home to the U.S. Navy's Yorktown Naval Weapons Station and a supply depot at nearby Cheatham Annex. Camp Peary and Coast Guard Training Center Yorktown are also located in York County. Although each is primarily located in other jurisdictions, portions of Fort Eustis, Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, Cheatham Annex, and Camp Peary extend into James City County. 37°4′47.4″N 76°24′22.5″W / 37.079833°N 76.406250°W / 37.079833; -76.406250 Chiefdom List of forms of government A chiefdom
1250-645: The Yuan , Ming , and Qing-era Chinese governments, principally in Yunnan . The arrangement is generally known as the Native Chieftain System ( Chinese : 土司 制度 ; pinyin : Tǔsī Zhìdù ). In prehistoric South-West Asia, alternatives to chiefdoms were the non-hierarchical systems of complex acephalous communities , with a pronounced autonomy of single-family households. These communities have been analyzed recently by Berezkin, who suggests
1300-533: The 1970s, all combined to help make the Historic Triangle area of Colonial Virginia become one of the most popular tourist destinations in the United States by the end of the 20th century. In Colonial times, and even in the first 150 years of the United States, much like Virginia as a whole, the Virginia Peninsula was in an almost constant state of change in terms of local government, largely due to growth, as counties were divided and towns were formed as
1350-630: The MSA, comprising the cities of Newport News, Hampton, Poquoson and Williamsburg, and the counties of Gloucester, James City and York, was combined with the Norfolk–Virginia Beach–Portsmouth MSA and renamed the "Norfolk–Virginia Beach–Newport News MSA". The Virginia Peninsula subregion includes four independent cities ( Hampton , Newport News , Poquoson and Williamsburg ) and two counties ( James City County and York County ). There are currently no incorporated towns. There were also
1400-468: The Virginia Peninsula area under their earlier names. The following is a listing of these 11 extinct shire, counties, towns, and cities, with the approximate dates they existed: Generally surrounded by water, the Virginia Peninsula is linked to other areas across the surrounding water barriers of the James and York Rivers , and the harbor of Hampton Roads by 2 bridge–tunnels , 2 large drawbridges , and
1450-655: The York River from the Virginia Peninsula. Early in the 16th century, Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to see the Chesapeake Bay , which they called Bahía de Madre de Dios or Bahía de Santa Maria. They were searching for the Northwest Passage to India and the Orient. They named the land now known as Virginia , as Ajacán . The Spanish succeeded in founding a colonial settlement in
1500-474: The active participation of his wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller , who wanted to celebrate the patriots and the early history of the United States . The restoration of the colonial capital, construction of the Colonial Parkway by the U.S. National Park Service, several major enhancements at Jamestown and Yorktown, and development of several theme parks such as Busch Gardens Williamsburg beginning in
1550-807: The area's truck farming and an entire new development planned by a C&O land agent to attract farmers of Scandinavian descent from the colder regions of the American Mid-West emerged at Norge shortly after the start of the 20th century. Later in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the two world wars, massive military facilities were established on large reservations which today contain Langley Air Force Base , Fort Eustis , Naval Weapons Station Yorktown , and Camp Peary . To make way, all of Mulberry Island and entire communities including Lackey , Halstead's Point , Penniman , Bigler's Mill , and Magruder disappeared in
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1600-459: The basis of finance ( staple finance v. wealth finance ). Service argued that chief rose to assume a managerial status to redistribute agricultural surplus to ecologically specialized communities within this territory (staple finance). Yet in re-studying the Hawaiian chiefdoms used as his case study, Timothy Earle observed that communities were rather self-sufficient. What the chief redistributed
1650-406: The communities recognize the authority of a single kin group or individual with hereditary centralized power, dwelling in the primary community. Each community will have its own leaders, which are usually in a tributary and/or subservient relationship to the ruling elite of the primary community. A complex chiefdom is a group of simple chiefdoms controlled by a single paramount center and ruled by
1700-534: The country's oldest military base still in use, is located at Old Point Comfort . Old Point Comfort is also the site of the first landing of Africans in America, in 1619. After declaring independence from Great Britain, Virginia's first state capital was Williamsburg . Also, the decisive battle of the American Revolution , the siege of Yorktown in 1781, took place on the Virginia Peninsula. During
1750-461: The diffuse patterns of political power distributed among Mueang (principalities) where circles of influence were more important than central power. The concept counteracts modern tendencies to look for unified political power like that of the large European kingdoms and nation states, which one scholar posited were an inadvertent byproduct of 15th-century advances in map-making technologies . Nikolay Kradin has demonstrated that an alternative to
1800-454: The evolutionary underpinnings of the chiefdom model are weighed down by racist and outdated theoretical baggage that can be traced back to Lewis Morgan 's 19th-century cultural evolution. From this perspective, pre-state societies are treated as underdeveloped, the savage and barbaric phases that preceded civilization. Pauketat argues that the chiefdom type is a limiting category that should be abandoned, and takes as his main case study Cahokia ,
1850-446: The general group. Chiefdoms and chiefs are sometimes identified as the same as kingdoms and kings , and therefore understood as monarchies , particularly when they are understood as not necessarily states, but having monarchic representation or government. In anthropological theory , one model of human social development rooted in ideas of cultural evolution describes a chiefdom as a form of social organization more complex than
1900-543: The king or chief Togbui Ga , the Fon people Dah , the Kotafon people Ga , and Ashanti people Asantehene . Traditional authority is a distinguishing feature in the landscape of contemporary Africa. It remains important in organising the life of people at the local level despite modern state structures. Tusi ( Chinese : 土司 ), also known as Headmen or Chieftains, were tribal leaders recognized as imperial officials by
1950-616: The mouth of the James River off the eastern tip of Warwick County . The 1862 Siege of Yorktown took place along the York River. Finally, after a lengthy standoff, the largest Union Army of the war under General George B. McClellan chased the retreating Confederates through the Williamsburg Line and westward literally to the "Gates of Richmond", where the swampy upper reaches of the Chickahominy River created
2000-401: The new military base which became the U.S. Army's Fort Eustis . In Elizabeth City County , tracks were extended from Newport News to reach Old Point Comfort , where resort hotels and Buckroe Beach were developed. There, a new town was incorporated. Phoebus was named after one of its early leading citizens, Harrison Phoebus . In James City County, Toano became a major shipping point for
2050-531: The new railroad opened paths to ship products west, as well as offering an economically viable method of shipping the rich bituminous coal of the region to fuel the Industrial Revolution . However, the tidal portion of the James River , while navigable from Hampton Roads to the Fall Line at Richmond, couldn't accommodate the deep drafts of collier ships. The Peninsula had been long without
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2100-626: The population grew. Some towns grew to become cities. Under the state constitutional changes in 1871, extant and future cities in Virginia became independent cities of the counties they had formerly been located within. However, in the second half of the 20th century, an unprecedented wave of city-county-town local government consolidations took place in South Hampton Roads and on the Virginia Peninsula. Nowhere else in Virginia have rural areas and more dense cities been combined in such
2150-718: The process. However, many of the displaced Virginians chose to relocate to Grove in James City County and other areas close by on the Peninsula. After the capital of Virginia moved to Richmond in 1780 for greater security during the American Revolutionary War, Williamsburg became much less busy. By the early 20th century, it was described as a "sleepy little hamlet", known best for the College of William and Mary and Eastern State Hospital, which
2200-556: The regional Mississippian culture chiefdom of Joara . Located in present-day western North Carolina , this was the first European settlement in the interior of North America. The first permanent English settlement in North America was established in 1607 at Jamestown . The first continuously occupied settlement was at Kecoughtan in Elizabeth City County what is now the City of Hampton . Nearby, Fort Monroe , formerly
2250-599: The south side. (Locally, South Hampton Roads is commonly called "the Southside", but this is not to be confused with " Southside Virginia ", a separate region of the south central portion of Virginia located farther inland.) More recently, the boundaries of the Hampton Roads metropolitan area have expanded to include the two southernmost counties of the Middle Peninsula ( Gloucester and Matthews ), across
2300-589: The state of a king ( raja ). Also see Suhas Chatterjee, Mizo Chiefs and the Chiefdom (1995). Most African traditional societies involved chiefdoms in their political and social structure before European colonisation . For an example see the political organisation of the Mandinka people in West Africa. Each clan, tribe, kingdom, and empire had its traditional leader, king, or queen. Ewe people call
2350-400: The world's largest shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company . Hotels, houses, schools and businesses sprung up there, and at many points along the new rail line in Warwick, York and James City counties. Oyster Point became a shipping place for the watermen and the new town of Lee Hall, Virginia , emerged, and became an important point due to its proximity to Yorktown and later to
2400-498: Was a hegemony of chiefdoms with supreme chiefs in each and a system of subsidiary chiefs. The ranks of the chiefs included ordinary chiefs, elders, priests or cattle-owners and head chiefs. The Arthashastra , a work on politics written some time between the 4th century BC and 2nd century AD by Indian author Chanakya , similarly describes the Rajamandala (or "Raja-mandala,") as circles of friendly and enemy states surrounding
2450-459: Was not staple goods, but prestige goods to his followers that helped him to maintain his authority (wealth finance). Some scholars contest the utility of the chiefdom model for archaeological inquiry. The most forceful critique comes from Timothy Pauketat , whose Chiefdom and Other Archaeological Delusions outlines how chiefdoms fail to account for the high variability of the archaeological evidence for middle-range societies. Pauketat argues that
2500-544: Was the successor to the country's first mental hospital, as well as its fading memories and deteriorating colonial sites. All that changed dramatically beginning in 1926. The restoration and recreation of Colonial Williamsburg , one of the largest historic restorations ever undertaken, was championed by the Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin and the patriarch of the Rockefeller family , John D. Rockefeller Jr. , along with
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