“To Rule by Customes”: Powhatan Assertions of Territorial Possessions against the Virginia Company, 1607–1624
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines Powhatan assertions of territorial possession in the context of English colonization in the Chesapeake watershed during the early seventeenth century. The Powhatans expressed territorial possession through a broad range of practices including inheritance, conquest, the physical occupation of land, topographical marking, and ceremonies. This is especially evident during the first two years of the colony (1607–9), when the Powhatans first became entangled with English colonists from the Virginia Company of London. During the Powhatan-English war (1609–14) and the period of an uneasy peace between 1614 and 1622, the Powhatans communicated their rights of possession through military actions and diplomatic rhetoric. Following their successful siege of Jamestown in 1622, the Powhatans and other Chesapeake Algonquian nations continued to maintain their territorial possessions through the defense of their cornfields. By focusing on these Powhatan legal claims, this investigation challenges the assumption that Indigenous traditions of law had little impact on English colonial expansion in the Chesapeake. Instead, the article argues that Powhatan assertions of territorial possessions defied the Virginia Company on a legal and cultural level, unsettling the assumption that Indigenous peoples’ uses of law are a characteristically modern—as opposed to a deep historical—phenomenon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".