They were excellent farmers and were envied among their fellow Native Americans for their fishing prowess. They were peaceful to an extreme and had little interest in arms. Three hundred years ago the British scientist Thomas Harriot wrote, “Those weapons that they have, are onlie bowes made of Witch hazle, and arrows of reeds; neither have they anything to defend themselves but targets made of barcks; and some armours made of sticks wickered together with thread.”

It took British colonists to turn these people militant and they did so quite efficiently by, simultaneously, threatening them with God’s wrath if they didn’t convert immediately to Christianity, decimating the population by importing influenza and smallpox, demanding food and shelter they were too lazy to provide for themselves and murdering one of the tribe’s favorite chiefs, Wingina, who, the colonists were convinced, erroneously, as it happened, was plotting an attack on the British settlements.

To the colonists’ indignant surprise, rather than accepting the Lord Jesus Christ into their hearts, the Indians declared allegiance to their own deities—spirits called Manitous—and then war against the British, the opening action of which (according to history as writ by young Mary Beth McConnell) was the assault on the Lost Colonists at Roanoke Island.

After the settlers fled, the tribe—anticipating British reinforcements—took a new look at weaponry and began to use copper, which had been used only for decoration, in making arms. Metal arrowheads were much sharper than flint and easier to make. However, unlike in the movies, an arrow fired by an unpulleyed bow usually won’t penetrate very far into the skin and is rarely fatal. To finish off his wounded adversary the Weapemeoc warrior would apply the coup de grace—a blow to the head with a club called, appropriately, a “coup stick,” which the tribe became very talented in making.

A coup stick is nothing more than a large, rounded rock bound into the split end of a stick and lashed into place with a leather thong. It’s a very efficient weapon, and the one that Mary Beth McConnell was now making, based on her knowledge of Native American archaeology, was surely as deadly as the ones that—in her theory—had crushed the skulls and snapped the spines of the Roanoke settlers as they fought their last battle on the shores of the Paquenoke at what was now called Black-water Landing.

She’d made hers out of two curved support rods from the old dinner table chair in the cabin. The rock was the one that Tom, the Missionary’s friend, had flung at her. She’d mounted it in between the two rods and bound it with long strips of denim torn from her shirttail. The weapon was heavy—six or seven pounds—but it wasn’t too heavy for Mary Beth, who regularly lifted thirty- and forty-pound rocks at archaeological digs.