The Piscataway were recorded by the English (in days before uniform spelling) as the Pascatowies, Paschatoway, Pazaticans, Pascoticons, Paskattaway, Pascatacon, Piscattaway, and Puscattawy.

They were also referred to by the names of their villages: Moyaone, Accotick, or Accokicke, or Accokeek; Potapaco, or Portotoack; Sacayo, or Sachia; Zakiah, and Yaocomaco, or Youcomako, or Yeocomico, or Wicomicons.

[9] Related Algonquian-speaking tribes included the Anacostan, Chincopin, Choptico, Doeg, or Doge, or Taux; Tauxeneen, Mattawoman, and Pamunkey.

Their crops included maize, several varieties of beans, melons, pumpkins, squash and (ceremonial) tobacco, which were bred and cultivated by women.

Men used bows and arrows to hunt bear, elk, deer, and wolves, as well as smaller game such as beaver, squirrels, partridges, and wild turkeys.

[20] A succession of Indigenous peoples occupied the Chesapeake and Tidewater region, arriving according to archeologists' estimates from roughly 3,000 to 10,000 years ago.

[21] Sometime around AD 800, peoples living along the Potomac had begun to cultivate maize as a supplement to their ordinary hunting-gathering diet of fish, game, and wild plants.

The onset of a centuries-long "Little Ice Age" after 1300 had driven Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples from upland and northern communities southward to the warmer climate of the Potomac basin.

By 1400, the Piscataway and their Algonquian tribal neighbors had become increasingly numerous because of their sophisticated agriculture, which provided calorie-rich maize, beans and squash.

By 1600, incursions by the Susquehannock and other Iroquoian peoples from the north had almost entirely destroyed many of the Algonquian settlements above present-day Great Falls, Virginia on the Potomac River.

They gradually consolidated authority under hereditary chiefs, who exacted tribute, sent men to war, and coordinated the resistance against northern incursions and rival claimants to the lands.

Closely associated with them were the Nacotchtank people (Anacostans) who lived around present-day Washington, DC, and the Taux (Doeg) on the Virginia side of the river.

Kittamaquund and his wife converted to Christianity in 1640 by their friendship with the English Jesuit missionary Father Andrew White, who also performed their marriage.

After trying to claim Piscataway territory upon her father's death, the couple moved south across the Potomac to establish a trading post and live at Aquia Creek in present-day Stafford County, Virginia.

Colonial authorities forced the Piscataway to permit the Susquehannock, an Iroquoian-speaking people, to settle in their territory after having been defeated in 1675 by the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee), based in New York.

They were spread along the western edge of the Pennsylvania Colony, along with the Algonquian Lenape who had moved west from modern New Jersey, the Tutelo, the Shawnee and some Iroquois.

Most of the surviving tribe migrated north in the late eighteenth century and were last noted in the historical record in 1793 at Detroit, following the American Revolutionary War, when the United States gained independence.

In 1793 a conference in Detroit reported the peoples had settled in Upper Canada, joining other Native Americans who had been allies of the British in the conflict.

[citation needed] Numerous contemporary historians and archaeologists, including William H. Gilbert, Frank G. Speck, Helen Rountree, Lucille St. Hoyme, Paul Cissna, T. Dale Stewart, Christopher Goodwin, Christian Feest, James Rice, and Gabrielle Tayac, have documented that a small group of Piscataway families continued to live in their homeland.

Especially in the slave states, all free people of color were classified together as black, in the hypodescent classification resulting from the racial caste of slavery.

[citation needed] In the late 19th century, archaeologists, journalists, and anthropologists interviewed numerous residents in Maryland who claimed descent from tribes associated with the former Piscataway chiefdom.

The dramatic drop in Native American populations due to infectious disease and warfare, plus a racial segregation based on slavery, led to a binary view of race in the former colony.

By contrast, Catholic parish records in Maryland and some ethnographic reports accepted Piscataway self-identification and continuity of culture as Indians, regardless of mixed ancestry.

In the 20th century, Virginia and other southern states passed laws to enforce the "one-drop rule", classifying anyone with a discernible amount of African ancestry as "negro", "mulatto", or "black".

[citation needed] Chief Turkey Tayac was a prominent figure in the early and mid-twentieth century cultural revitalization movements.

[34] A fresh approach to understanding individual and family choices and self-identification among American Indian and African-American cultures is underway at several research universities.

[citation needed] The State of Maryland appointed a panel of anthropologists, genealogists, and historians to review primary sources related to Piscataway genealogy.

[35] In 1996 the Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs (MCIA) suggested granting state recognition to the Piscataway Conoy Confederacy and Subtribes.

[2][32] In December 2011, the Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs stated that the Piscataway had provided adequate documentation of their history and recommended recognition.