"Human society" consisted of a single family - or perhaps several, with a dozen or so people - wandering great distances along the rivers and through the woods. In the earliest days of human settlement, family groups probably traveled downstream from our county far enough to gather oysters and crabs from the salty waters of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay.
Who made the decision on where to go, and when to go? Odds are, the parents governed the group until they grew too old or too weak to exert control. For 15,000 years in this area, it's likely that young children have asked "Are we there yet?" while teenagers have looked for a chance to establish independence and control over their own lives.
We know they wandered through Prince William, though construction in the last 50 years has obliterated many of the archeological sites before they were even identified. Just west of Manassas Gap on the Shenandoah River near Front Royal is the well-studied "Thunderbird" site, a quarry that has been used for 10,000 years. There, different groups of Native Americans shaped quartz into tools until metal tools became common in Virginia, which occurred only in the last 400 years.
Intermittently in the "Archaic Era," each family would meet other hunting groups. The family leaders would decide whether another group was friend or foe, and whether to attack or intermarry. After agriculture was adopted several thousand years ago, different family groups joined together and planted corn, beans, and squash in the same area year after year.
These were the first Virginia towns. In Prince William, they would have been in flat areas near the rivers, especially the protein-rich Potomac. Since the end of World War Two and completion of the Shirley Highway, we have built subdivision after subdivision in the same areas.
Now we are building on the ridges as well; even Cherry Hill Peninsula is being covered with houses. However, we are not the first to live or explore in these areas. If your house is within a mile of a perennial stream, especially east of I-95 near the Potomac River, there's a good chance that Native Americans once stood at least briefly in what is now your back yard. [NOTE: you will be hard pressed to find a spot in the county that is not within a mile of a stream that has running water all year.]
In those original Virginia towns, fires were kept burning constantly for cooking, drying, and warmth. This time of year, when wood stoves add a familiar smell to the neighborhood, it requires only a little imagination to step outside your door, close your eyes, and picture a community of barrel-shaped huts covered with cattails and other reeds rather than rectangular vinyl-covered houses. If you have a "Redskins" cookout in the Fall, you might catch a glimpse of tribal behavior too...
Hunting and gathering meant that family groups were constantly on the move, and were small groups of people. Stable life in a town required a different decision-making process, where many separate families would share the same space for long periods of time. Governing a family, though a challenge, is simple compared to governing people without close blood ties. In time, dominant families emerged in each town... and the head of those families became the chief.
The power of being "chief" was inherited in the Virginia tribes speaking an Algonquian language, on the Coastal Plain. There were no formal elections leading to peaceful transfer of power to unrelated members of the tribe, such as we will see each November. When the leader died in a Virginia town 500 years ago, his brothers inherited his authority. When they died, the children of their sisters inherited. If you want to impress friends with a multi-syllable word, call it "matrilineal" succession.
When the Europeans first arrived in Virginia in the 1500's, they found a hierarchical society where chiefs ("werowances") and priests had great authority in their separate towns. They controlled trade with other tribes, and forced the members of the tribe to give the leaders a high percentage of their annual harvest of corn, deerhides, etc.
The towns themselves were largely independent from each other, with one major exception. The Europeans also found the beginnings of a nation-state based on one chief, Powhatan. That chief, also known informally within his tribes as Wahunsunacock, had inherited control of 4 tribes around the falls of the James and the York River. He then compelled another 30 tribes to accept his authority.
Prince William was outside his control, but not independent of his influence. One possible comparison is that the small villages in our county were like Canada today - not part of the United States, but clearly affected by it.
Before 1607, Virginia government was tribal and inherited. Nepotism was common - the chief favored his family with the good jobs, and Powhatan installed his relatives as new chiefs after conquering some tribes. Power was restricted to a few, and the unelected chiefs could make arbitrary decisions and impose high taxes on their subjects.
The colonial Virginia government was not very different. After 1700, a small number of the "First Families of Virginia" controlled the General Assembly and the county courts. Democracy as we know it did not exist.
Between 1630 and 1776, residents of Prince William voted for only two officials, the representatives to the House of Burgesses. County residents also voted for the parish vestry - but just once, when each parish was first created. Afterwards, the vestry appointed all replacement members without a vote by the citizens.
All county officials, such as the sheriff and the justices on the county court (equivalent to modern supervisors), were appointed by the Governor in Williamsburg. The county court and the vestry set the tax rate each year for citizens, and there was no opportunity to replace those officials through elections.
The European settlers had very different culture than the Native Virginians, but the good jobs always seemed to go to those with family connections and taxation without representation was still a basic part of Prince William government. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
But fast forward to today. Over two centuries after the American Revolution, we think good government requires competitive elections, honest real property assessments and tax collection, Comprehensive Plans and zoning ordinances, educated leaders, even conflict-of-interest laws so one family can't get enriched at the expense of all the rest. But that's a recent innovation in the history of this piece of land we call Prince William County.