Time is often compared to the image of a river. Time flows constantly and effortlessly like a river. It changes course and composition as it runs - a bit brackish here, but fresh and clear just downstream. It is full of twists and digressing rivulets, but remains a single connected entity. If one could jump into the river of time, the ripples and whirlpools of history would unravel themselves.

In a way, time does flow through the veins of the James River. It is one the four major Chesapeake Bay waterways which carved out the coastline and eventual history of the American state of Virginia. The story of the James begins well before it gained its forename. Its course and perhaps its existence was a product of a geologic event some 35.5 million years ago which left an enormous crater which currently exists underneath the Chesapeake Bay. To the west, a series of small streams fell out of the mountain range now known as the Alleghenies. These lesser rivers merged together and meandered south. They cut a deep swath through the Blue Ridge Mountains and turned east into the lowland, before draining into the Chesapeake and the Atlantic Ocean.

The river continued its pattern of existence, unmolested by human hands for time immemorial. Suddenly though, human beings spread from the western part of the continent and settled around the river. Our knowledge of the earliest natives living around the James River is incomplete. It is safe to assume, however, that the Paleolithic peoples who populated the lands around the river showed it respect and reverence. The river, as they saw, fed them, provided water, flooded the soil, provided for the local walnut trees, channeled resources and trade and replenished the ancestors and heirs of these people. The warlike tribes may have battled at the banks of the river. It probably bore the blood of countless Native Americans, over the applauding rapids and beyond the bends and mountains, into the great ocean beyond.

This reverence for the James River, still expressed by the local Native Americans of today, is a way of understanding a river as a generative force, replenishing the pages of history over its seasons. While most of this history is lost, our knowledge of James area native civilization and history is strongest in the periods immediately preceding the European colonization of the Americas. Two competing groups of natives existed along the James during this period. The Powhatan Indians made their homes downstream, in the tidal portion of the river. The Monacans, a Sioux people, lived upstream, west of the river's fall line.