The Manahoac, also recorded as Mahock, were a Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, who lived in northern Virginia at the time of European contact.

They lived primarily along the Rappahannock River west of present-day Fredericksburg and the Fall Line, and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

By the 1669 census, because of raids by Haudenosaunee tribes from the north during the Beaver Wars and probably infectious disease from European contact, the Manahoac were reduced to only 50 bowmen in their former area.

Governor of Virginia Alexander Spotswood recorded that the Stegaraki subtribe of the Manahoac was present at Fort Christanna in Brunswick County.

The fort was created by Spotswood and sponsored by the College of William and Mary to convert natives to Christianity and teach them the English language.

In 1870, there was a report of Nikonha (Tutelo, c. 1765–1871), a "merry old man named Mosquito" living in Canada, who claimed to be "the last of the Manahoac" and the legal owner of much of northern Virginia.

[8] Like the other Siouan-speaking tribes of Virginia's Piedmont region (i.e., the Monacan, Tutelo, and Saponi), the Manahoac people lived in various independent villages.

Along the upper James River, where the closely related Monacan tribe was located, archeologists have found remnants of corn and squash in cooking pits.

[5] Archaeological evidence shows that an earthen mound burial culture existed in the Piedmont from AD 950 to the time of European contact.

These burial mounds, some of them reaching heights of at least 6 meters (20 ft), are believed to have been made by the ancestors of the Manahoac and other eastern Siouan-speaking groups.

Anthropologist James Mooney in 1894 suggested that the Manahoac spoke a Siouan language, based on his speculation that the town called Monasickapanough was related to Saponi.

His argument was based on the assumption that the initial syllable Mo-, Ma- was supposedly a Virginia Siouan morpheme meaning, "place, earth, country".