Archaeologist Julia King, a professor at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, will speak later this month in Middlesex County about the Rappahannock Tribe and Bacon’s Rebellion.

The Middlesex County Museum and Historical Society talk will be held at 4 p.m. on Sunday, June 29 in the court room on the second floor of the Old Courthouse in Saluda. King will speak about her recent archaeological work in the Dragon Run, which lies on the border of Middlesex and Gloucester counties.

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 Rappahannock, fled to the Dragon Swamp to avoid Bacon’s troops. King and a group of researchers have looked for signs of the presence of the tribe in the swamp.

This will be the third appearance of King on behalf of the Middlesex County Museum and Historical Society, speaking 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).

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.