Jessica A. Jenkins
Martin D. Gallivan
Brad Hatch3- 1Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, United States
- 2William & Mary, Department of Anthropology, Williamsburg, VA, United States
- 3Patawomeck Indian Tribe of Virginia, Fredericksburg, VA, United States
Environmental archaeology has often relied on common-pool resource models to interpret past human-environment relationships, yet these frameworks overlook Indigenous ontologies grounded in kinship with land, water, and more-than human beings. We propose commoning as a complementary approach that centers reciprocity, relational care, and cultural meaning alongside institutional regulation. Drawing on archaeological evidence from Virginia's Chesapeake Bay, we show how commoning reveals Indigenous environmental governance as a world-making practice. This framework advances environmental archaeology by integrating Indigenous epistemologies, supporting collaborative methods, and linking archaeological interpretation to contemporary environmental justice.
Introduction
In recent years, Indigenous Tribes in Virginia have taken powerful steps to reclaim ancestral lands and revitalize their longstanding relationships with rivers, forests, and estuaries. In January 2025, the Patawomeck Indian Tribe regained ownership of 870 acres along the Rappahannock River, with plans to restore natural habitats and reinvigorate traditional lifeways. The Nansemond Indian Nation acquired 71 acres of their ancestral territory in 2024, launching ecological restoration initiatives that reconnect community members with cultural landscapes. That same year, the Rappahannock Tribe amended its constitution to grant legal rights to the river herself, affirming her personhood and central role in tribal life and governance. The Pamunkey Indian Tribe continues millennia-old relationships with the Pamunkey River on their 1,600-acre reservation, where clay is still gathered from river shores for traditional pottery, even as rising sea levels and erosion threaten this ancestral homeland. These efforts represent more than environmental action; they are expressions of relational sovereignty, rooted in deep Indigenous understandings of land and water as kin.
Such initiatives reflect Indigenous relational worldviews, in which land and water are cared for through reciprocity, responsibility, and interdependence rather than extraction or ownership. The Rappahannock Tribe's recognition of river personhood exemplifies what (Todd 2014, 2017, 2018) describes as Indigenous law, defined as governance grounded in relationships with more-than-human beings. Governance here means not only formal institutions and rules, but also the relational practices and responsibilities, including reciprocity with more-than-human beings, that structure collective life. As (Kimmerer 2013) emphasizes, such traditions involve giving back to the land through everyday acts of care. These are not merely symbolic revivals, but what Leanne (Simpson 2017) and (Estes 2019) frame as resurgence: the renewal of land-based responsibilities that sustain both community and ecology. In this sense, contemporary restoration efforts are more than environmental actions; they are living expressions of relational governance.
Recently, archaeologists have relied on the framework of common-pool resource management (CPRM) to interpret how past communities governed shared environments. Building on Ostrom's (1990) and (Ostrom et al. 1994) influential work, CPRM has drawn attention to cooperative strategies and rule-based institutions that allowed groups to sustain resources without privatization or state control. This perspective has been generative for environmental archaeology, offering important insights into how communities organized collective access to and governance of land, water, and other shared resources. Yet, as critics note, CPRM is not without limitations. Although Ostrom's framework was instrumental in challenging the “tragedy of the commons” narrative, it has faced criticism for its reliance on rational choice theory and its difficulty in transcending nature–culture dualism, which may limit its applicability in non-capitalistic and non-Western contexts (Bresnihan, 2015; García-López et al., 2021).
Indigenous scholars have long emphasized that such Western frameworks fall short by overlooking the importance of interdependent kinship and familial relationships with land, water, and more-than-human kin that are mutually respectful and balanced (e.g., Cajte, 2000; Wilson and Inkster, 2018). It is here that commoning provides a valuable extension. We define “commoning” as the everyday practices by which communities sustain shared environments through relationships of responsibility, reciprocity, and respect. We see commoning as building on CPRM's insights by widening the lens: expanding the focus from rules and institutions toward recognizing the relational and affective practices that sustain shared environments. Commons are not only material resources, but also the social norms, cultural meanings, and everyday practices that bring them into being (Bollier and Helfrich, 2015). Commoning thus complements CPRM by emphasizing that governance is not simply about institutional regulation but also lived relationships. For example, harvesting, burning, fishing, or building can simultaneously be ecological strategies and expressions of care, reciprocity, and cultural meaning. Indigenous scholars such as (Todd 2014, 2017, 2018); (Kimmerer 2013); (Simpson 2014, 2017); (Whyte 2018) have deepened this perspective by showing how responsibilities to land, water, and more-than-human kin anchor collective stewardship.
A commoning framework offers environmental archaeologists a flexible and relational lens for interpreting past stewardship practices across diverse cultural contexts. While it aligns with Indigenous epistemologies in North America, it is not culturally exclusive; in contemporary scholarship, commoning has been applied to a wide range of historical and geographic settings, making it a powerful tool for understanding collective human-environment relationships. The following section situates this framework within the broader context of environmental archaeology.
Commoning and environmental archaeology
Environmental archaeology examines how communities lived in and shaped their environments by analyzing biological, geological, and cultural remains (Dincauze, 2000). The field has long integrated zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, geoarchaeology, and site formation studies to reconstruct past human–environment dynamics. Within this work, CPRM has provided a useful framework for identifying how communities cooperated to sustain shared resources (Garland and Thompson, 2023; Jenkins and Gallivan, 2019; Thompson, 2023). Yet CPRM focuses primarily on rule-based institutions and rational-choice models, leaving less room for kinship, reciprocity, and cultural meaning, which are important dimensions central to many Indigenous environmental relationships.
A commoning approach extends CPRM by offering archaeologists a richer set of theoretical and methodological tools. Theoretically, commoning foregrounds the everyday practices and cultural values through which commons were created and sustained. It allows archaeologists to consider multispecies perspectives, demonstrating how oysters, fish, trees, or fire were not simply resources but active participants in shaping human life. In this sense, commoning highlights the co-creation of worlds, where people and more-than-human beings produced landscapes, lifeways, and governance systems together. This reframes activities such as oyster harvesting, forest burning, or fish weir construction not solely as resource management, but also as acts of care, relational practice, and world-building.
Methodologically, commoning encourages archaeologists to:
• Read material evidence relationally: analyzing faunal, botanical, and geoarchaeological data for signs of collective action and care.
• Integrate multiple knowledge sources: pairing archaeological datasets with oral histories, ethnography, and descendant community perspectives to interpret stewardship practices.
• Attend to variability and context: recognizing that commons were not uniform systems, but dynamic, place-based arrangements shaped by cultural values and local ecological conditions.
• Center collaboration: working with descendant communities to interpret how material practices reflected responsibilities to land and water, rather than assuming purely economic motivations.
Taken together, these tools open up new kinds of questions for environmental archaeology that CPRM alone does not fully enable:
• How were environments shaped through shared responsibility and care?
• How did ceremonial life intersect with ecological practice?
• How do descendant communities interpret ancestral relationships with land and water?
• In what ways did material practices reflect cosmological obligations alongside economic strategies?
• How did humans and more-than-human beings co-create landscapes and sustain shared worlds?
At the same time, a commoning perspective cautions against overextending interpretations beyond the material record. Ceremonial or affective dimensions may not always be archaeologically visible, but careful inferences become possible when material data is read in dialogue with oral history, ethnography, and descendant community knowledge.
By equipping archaeologists with these tools and orienting them toward these questions, commoning moves the conversation forward in two key ways. First, it shifts interpretation from resource use to relationship-building, showing how governance emerged not only through institutions but through lived obligations to more-than-human kin. Second, it aligns archaeological practice with contemporary Indigenous scholarship and stewardship, making the field more relevant to ongoing conversations around sovereignty, resilience, and environmental justice.
In this sense, commoning does not replace CPRM but builds on it, expanding archaeological interpretation from cooperation as an economic strategy by widening the lens to include relational and affective practices. For environmental archaeologists, this framework opens new pathways to analyze past lifeways while also linking those insights to the challenges and possibilities of the present. The following case studies from Virginia's Chesapeake region (Figure 1) illustrate how this framework works in practice. Archaeological evidence from oyster reefs, fishing traditions, and forest management reveals how Indigenous communities co-created landscapes with more-than-human beings, embedding ecological strategies within systems of reciprocity and care. By situating these practices within a commoning framework, we can better understand not only how people sustained ecosystems, but how they sustained relationships and worlds.
Figure 1. Map showing the Chesapeake Bay, tributary rivers including those referenced in the article (Potomac, Nansemond, and Pamunkey), and the archaeological site of Kiskiak.
Commoning in the Chesapeake, past and present
These theoretical insights take concrete meaning when examining specific places where commoning has shaped landscapes across millennia. The Chesapeake Bay, the largest U.S. estuary, has supported Indigenous lifeways for over 16,000 years (McAvoy and McAvoy, 1997; Wagner, 2017). By around 200 CE, communities in eastern Virginia established semi-permanent villages along tidal creeks, cultivating relationships with forests, rivers, estuaries, and their more-than-human inhabitants through material, ceremonial, and political practices that shaped how people lived and cared for land and waters across seasons and generations (Gallivan et al., 2024).
Archaeological evidence including radiocarbon dates, soil cores, faunal remains, and oyster shells from sites like Kiskiak on the York River (see Figure 1), alongside oral histories and ethnographic accounts, reveal how Indigenous communities collectively shaped and sustained shared landscapes. Practices such as managing oyster reefs, building fish traps and eel pots, and using fire to care for forests exemplify commoning as a lived, adaptive tradition. Rather than static resource use systems, they were dynamic forms of caretaking embedded in cultural values, ecological knowledge, and cosmological worldviews.
The following case studies highlight how commoning took shape across different Chesapeake ecological zones, offering insight into how communities created and maintained commons through reciprocal environmental relationships. They also demonstrate relationships being renewed today by descendant communities reclaiming and revitalizing ancestral practices.
Commoning and oyster reefs
Evidence from attributes of archaeological oyster shells excavated from Kiskiak, a Woodland-period village along Virginia's lower York River, documents intensive harvesting of local oyster reefs beginning around 200 CE when ancestral Chesapeake communities began to settle down, creating creek-side villages. Intensive harvesting between 200 and 1607 CE occurred alongside maricultural practices such as selective harvesting of nearshore reefs, seasonal oyster collection, and fossil shell transport to enhance reef productivity (see (Jenkins and Gallivan 2019, 2024) for full discussions of the archaeological evidence of oyster mariculture at Kiskiak). While we might frame these practices as sustainable, a commoning perspective emphasizes how they were embedded in cultural meaning and relational worldviews, expressing forms of reciprocal responsibility and care in everyday life.
Ethnohistoric accounts from Indigenous communities throughout Eastern North America suggest shellfish harvesting was embedded in cosmological understandings linking shellfish, water, and ancestry (Claassen, 2008, 2019; Hallowell, 1960; Hamell, 1983; George, 1987; Jenkins, 2026). Offshore reefs appear to have held special significance, possibly ceremonial, and show evidence of less intensive harvest, while nearshore reefs sustained daily needs and embodied community tenure. Fossil shell transport for reef building reveals intentional environmental stewardship carrying cultural and ecological meaning. Given their prominent landscape placement, the substantial shell middens at creek mouths likely served as community markers and places of community gathering (Jenkins, 2026). In this reading, oyster harvesting reflected partnership rather than extraction, positioning oysters not as resources to be consumed, but as participants in an estuarine world shaped through reciprocal engagement. These practices endured despite political shifts, including Kiskiak's incorporation into the Powhatan Chiefdom in the late 16th century, underscoring their deep-rooted cultural importance.
Contemporary Indigenous communities continue to revitalize these principles. Since 2020, the Nansemond Indian Nation has led oyster reef restoration in their ancestral watershed, partnering with environmental organizations and emphasizing relationship-based stewardship. As Nansemond tribal citizen, council vice chair, and historian Nikki Bass explains, “when people view the environment as something to use rather than something to be in a relationship with, it leads to depletion and destruction” (Crowley, 2023). Bass's words echo relational values evident in the archaeological record at Kiskiak, where oyster harvesting reflected partnership rather than extraction, illustrating how commoning bridges past and present through ecological care, and community resilience.
Commoning and fishing practices
Although Virginia's acidic soils often limit faunal preservation, particularly small fish bones, shell middens provide crucial windows into past subsistence, preserving fish remains that signal communal harvesting and processing activities. Even where bone does not survive, fishing practices can be inferred through material proxies: net-impressed ceramics, and motifs such as Abbott Zoned Incised designs, likely reference the use of fish weirs and other collective capture technologies (Gallivan, 2016, p. 94–98; Lattanzi et al., 2011; Stewart, 1998). Ongoing zooarchaeological analysis of fish remains from archaeological sites in the region aims to identify targeted species and capture methods, offering a more detailed reconstruction of past fishing strategies and their relationship to shared use of riverine resources and potential evidence of commoning (e.g., Przelomska et al., 2024).
Hatch's (2022) documentation of eel pot and carp pen traditions among the Patawomeck Indian Tribe of Virginia reveals how fishing practices embody commoning principles across generations. Patawomeck communities have sustained deep relationships with Potomac River waterways through adaptive practices that support subsistence, social bonds and ceremonial life. Eel pots are woven from white oak splints on wooden molds, tarred and submerged seasonally in tidal waters, exemplifying technology intimately tied to specific riverine ecologies. These pots and carp pens extending into creeks supported community-scale harvesting strategies enabling flexible, sustainable engagement with local fisheries. Oral histories, archaeological evidence, and ethnographic documentation trace these practices back generations, linking past and present through shared commitment to land and water.
While fishing strategies and materials changed over time due to shifting markets, legal restrictions, and technological innovations, the persistence and revitalization of eel pot making through tribal workshops and apprenticeship programs exemplifies commoning as a dynamic, (Figure 2). These practices reflect technical expertise and moral and spiritual relationships with the aquatic world. (Hatch 2022, p. 18), a Patawomeck Tribal citizen, describes how his community is “haunted by waters,” with fishing traditions imbued with memory, resistance, and refusal to be erased.
Figure 2. 2023 Virginia Humanities-funded Patawomeck eel pot workshop participants. Front row, left to right: Molly Lebow (College of William and Mary), Deborah Wilkinson (Upper Mattaponi), Deborah Rantanen (Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum), Reagan Andersen (Patawomeck). Back row, left to right: Desmond Ellsworth (Nansemond), Mara Dicenta Vilker (College of William and Mary), Brad Hatch (Patawomeck, Instructor).
Eel pots and carp pens are not relics but living instruments of cultural survival representing an enduring ethic of relationality with more-than-human beings and caretaking that sustains ecosystems, community continuity, and collective life. The Patawomeck example offers a resilient model of Indigenous commoning that bridges past, present, and future through riverine lifeways shaped by reciprocity, adaptability, and place-based knowledge.
Commoning and forest management
Indigenous forest management through controlled burning exemplifies commoning's landscape-scale applications. Beginning around 200 CE, archaeological evidence from Indian Field Creek shows systematic burning that cleared underbrush, promoted fruit- and mast-bearing trees, and created edge habitats supporting increased biodiversity (Gallivan, 2016, p. 87–90; Jones, 2005; McKnight, 2005). Pollen cores from Kiskiak reveal archaeological evidence that charcoal increases and substantial oak and hickory declines coinciding with creek-side village formation, indicating intentional landscape modification through collective stewardship. Archaeobotanical evidence shows shifts in wild plant diversity as controlled burning created disturbed environments receptive to berries, nuts, and herbaceous plants supplementing maize horticulture (McKnight et al., 2022). Colonial observers like John Smith and William Strachey attributed forest openness near villages to Native burning. In the early 17th century, (Smith 1986, p. 31) noted that cleared conditions allowed riders to “gallop a horse amongst these woods any waie.”
These commoning practices created “edge effects” at habitat boundaries—zones where plant and animal diversity often increases with environmental heterogeneity (Odum, 1971; Risser, 1995; Wiens et al., 1985; Ries et al., 2004). Most wild plants documented in early colonial accounts—including pawpaws, hazelnut, and various berries—thrive in disturbed environments created by controlled burning. White-tailed deer benefited significantly from enhanced forage in burned areas managed through shared responsibility. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence suggests these edge environments held cosmological significance as liminal spaces of spiritual power in Algonquian tradition (Hallowell, 1960; Gallivan and Henshaw, 2026). These practices align with broader Indigenous fire stewardship patterns across North America, where low-intensity burning maintained patch mosaics, promoted biodiversity, and reflected relational governance rooted in reciprocal obligation to land and more-than-human beings (Lightfoot et al., 2013; Liebmann, 2013; Delcourt and Delcourt, 1997).
Today, agencies like Virginia's Department of Wildlife Resources reintroduce prescribed fire for habitat restoration, recognizing that Virginia's landscapes evolved with fire and that fire suppression disrupted fire-dependent ecosystems. This continuity demonstrates how archaeological evidence of commoning practices informs contemporary environmental management, revealing “good fire” as a long-standing tradition rooted in community-based care rather than modern innovation.
Discussion and conclusion: commoning, environmental archaeology, and radical hope
The case studies from the Chesapeake suggest that commoning is not merely a strategy for resource management; it is a relational mode of governance rooted in cultural, ethical, and ecological lifeways. Practices such as oyster reef cultivation, eel pot fishing, and forest burning reflect systems of mutual care and accountability to more-than-human kin. These practices served as world-making engagements that sustained ecosystems. They were also historically dynamic, responding to shifting political, demographic, and environmental conditions. Commoning, in this sense, is not a static tradition but a flexible and adaptive process shaped by place and by specific moments in time.
A commoning perspective extends the aims of environmental archaeology by highlighting how, in certain times and places, landscapes were co-created through collective practice and ceremony. At Kiskiak, oyster harvesting persisted through political transformation, grounded in place-based knowledge and community continuity. Along the Potomac River, Patawomeck eel pots carried memory and embodied skill across generations, even amidst colonial disruption. These examples highlight the resilience of relational governance, which persisted not exclusively through formal institutions but also through shared meaning and cultural practice. These practices were not uniform across time or space. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence suggest that communities adapted their relationships with land and water in response to changing climates, political transformations, colonial intrusions, and shifting cultural priorities. Understanding commoning archaeologically thus requires attentiveness to variability, transformation, loss, and persistence. Avoiding essentialism requires recognizing Indigenous governance as innovative and place-based.
Importantly, commoning is not confined to the archaeological record. Contemporary tribal-led restoration efforts—including the Nansemond Indian Nation's oyster reef revitalization and Patawomeck eel pot apprenticeships—demonstrate that these practices remain vital components of Indigenous stewardship. These contemporary expressions are not direct replicas of past practices but represent the creative revitalization of ancestral principles within modern environmental, legal, and cultural contexts.
As Nansemond Chief Keith Anderson observes, “It's not just a Native thing or a non-Native thing, it's coming together as kindred human beings” (Crowley, 2023). This sentiment underscores the broader relevance of commoning: its capacity to gather diverse communities around shared commitments to environmental care. In this spirit, the living traditions of stewardship documented here reflect not only cultural continuity but a profound adaptability in the face of rupture, or what might be seen as resilience through renewal. Such adaptive, relational ethos finds deep resonance with Lear's (2006) concept of radical hope: a hope grounded not in preserving past forms, but in the imaginative regeneration of lifeways amid uncertainty. The archaeological record affirms that collective, reciprocal relationships with land and water have long sustained human and ecological wellbeing. These histories challenge narratives of inevitability around environmental decline and offer concrete, long-term examples of alternative modes of governance grounded in care and accountability. For archaeologists, the commoning framework underscores the importance of interpreting material practices not only as economic strategies but also as cultural and ethical commitments, and of pursuing collaborative methods that reflect those commitments in the present.
In both past and present contexts, commoning is a useful framework for interpreting collective environmental governance across cultures and regions, making it a valuable tool for environmental archaeology worldwide. For environmental archaeologists, adopting a commoning framework entails more than an analytical shift; it requires methodological commitment to community-based research and attentiveness to the ethical and political stakes of interpretation. It invites us to recognize landscapes as active participants in historical processes, shaped by generations of relational engagement. In this way, commoning becomes both an interpretive lens and a forward-looking practice. It positions environmental archaeology not only as a discipline for understanding the past, but as a field capable of supporting just, reciprocal, and resilient futures.
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Ethics statement
Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s)/minor(s)' legal guardian/next of kin, for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.
Author contributions
JJ: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. MG: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. BH: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.
Conflict of interest
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Keywords: commoning, environmental archaeology, Chesapeake archaeology, environmental stewardship, relational governance
Citation: Jenkins JA, Gallivan MD and Hatch B (2026) A commoning framework for environmental archaeology: beyond resource management in Indigenous North America. Front. Environ. Archaeol. 5:1669507. doi: 10.3389/fearc.2026.1669507
Received: 19 July 2025; Revised: 21 November 2025;
Accepted: 06 January 2026; Published: 04 February 2026.
Edited by:
Patrick Roberts, Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, GermanyReviewed by:
Tim Denham, Australian National University, AustraliaAron L. Crowell, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (SI), United States
Copyright © 2026 Jenkins, Gallivan and Hatch. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Martin D. Gallivan, bWRnYWxsQHdtLmVkdQ==