Wolf Creek Indian Village and Museum facts for kids

Wolf Creek Indian Village and Museum is a special place where you can see what a Native American village looked like long ago. It's a rebuilt village that shows how people lived around the years 1480 to 1520. We don't know for sure which Native American group lived there, but it might have been the Cherokee people or other tribes who spoke Siouan languages and often visited that area.

Discovering the Past: Archaeology

What is Archaeology?

Archaeology is the study of human history and prehistory through digging up old sites and looking at the things people left behind. Archaeologists are like detectives who piece together clues from the past.

How the Village Site Was Found

In 1970, workers were building a big road called Interstate 77 near Bastian, Virginia. They accidentally found an old Native American site! Building stopped so that archaeologists could quickly study the area. This is called Rescue archaeology because they had to save information before the road construction destroyed the site.

What Archaeologists Found

In May 1970, a person named Howard MacCord led the dig. They found many interesting things, including:

• The remains of eleven circular buildings, like wigwams.
• Some storage huts.
• Old fire pits.
• Eleven human skeletons.

This was the first official archaeology site recognized by the state in Bland County. It was named after Brown Johnston, who owned the farm where it was found.

Working Against Time

The archaeologists had to work very fast because the road construction couldn't be stopped for long. They even used big road graders to remove the top layers of dirt. Sometimes, they worked in the evenings, using car headlights to see what they were doing!

Bringing History to Life: The Reconstruction

Rebuilding the Village

Between 1992 and 1996, a new version of the village was built in Bland County, Virginia. It's very close to where the original site was found. This life-sized village was built based on the clues archaeologists found. They looked at marks in the ground called "post holes" and "post molds." These marks showed where wooden posts once stood.

What the Rebuilt Village Shows

The clues showed that the village had a fence made of posts, called a palisade. Inside, there were about a dozen circular buildings. Archaeologists also found several Native American graves. Some were inside the palisade, and some were outside. In the rebuilt village, these grave sites are marked exactly where they were found. You can also learn about how people were buried and what items were buried with them.

Making it Real

The people who rebuilt the village tried to make it as real as possible. They used the archaeology maps to place every pole and feature just like it was in the original village.

Today, the Wolf Creek Indian Village & Museum is owned and run by Bland County, Virginia. They use reenactors and people who do "living history" to teach visitors about what life was like in the village long ago. These interpreters dress up and act like people from that time, helping you imagine what it was truly like to live there.