On Sunday afternoon, June 29, 2025 at 4PM, Professor Julia King of Saint Mary’s College of Maryland will be speaking in the court room on the second floor of the Old Courthouse
in Saluda about her recent archaeological work in the Dragon Swamp, which lies on the southern border of Middlesex Country. Professor King’s talk will focus on the impact of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77) on Indigenous Tribes in the Middle Peninsula. The Rebellion, in which Nathaniel Bacon led frontiersmen, indentured servants, and enslaved people in an uprising against the
colonial government of Governor William Berkeley, was in protest of what Bacon regarded as government failure to protect settlers from attacks by Native Americans. Bacon’s forces attacked both Jamestown and nearby Native Americans (though not the tribe that had recently attacked settlers). One of the local tribes, the Rappahannocks, fled to the Dragon Swamp to avoid Bacon’s troops. Professor King and a group of researchers have looked for signs of the presences of the Rappahannocks in the Swamp.
This will be the third occasion on which Professor King has accepted the invitation of the Middlesex County Museum and Historical Society to speak about her work with Indigenous People in the Middle Peninsula. Her earlier presentations were on “Mapping the Rappahannock Indigenous Cultural Landscape” (2022) and about the discovery of a Native American site in Middlesex County (2024).
Professor King is a graduate of the College of William and Mary (B.A.), Florida State University (M.A. in Anthropology,) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Historical Archaeology). She has been the chair of the Department of Anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and is a former president of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2018, she received two significant awards for her work: the Out-of-State Award from the Archaeological Society of Virginia and the J.C. Harrington Award for Lifetime Contributions from the Society for Historical Archaeology.
