Archaeological Expeditions of the Peabody Museum in Middle Tennessee, 1877-1884 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Tennessee Archaeology, 2020
The Glass Mounds site (40WM3) in Williamson County is the only known Woodland period multi-mound center in the Cumberland River drainage of Tennessee. Historic land use practices during the twentieth century destroyed the majority of the site, and today Glass Mounds survives only as two conical earthworks. Although the site has been the subject of several antiquarian and modern archaeological investigations, those efforts have not been synthesized in any widely accessible format to date. Herein we describe the history of the Glass Mounds site and the results of recent archaeological testing, including an assessment of mound integrity and the recovery of new radiocarbon data.
Mounds Lost and Found: New Research at the Kincaid Site
2016
In 2003 SIUC archaeologists conducted test excavations at the southeast corner of the main plaza at Kincaid to evaluate the area for possible construction of a small interpretive platform and parking area. This article describes the 2003 work with particular reference to the Mississippian occupation and a “missing ” platform mound in that area. The much earlier Baumer occupation also encountered in these excavations is described in two other articles (Butler 2006; Lapham 2010) also available on this web site. This article originally appeared in Vol. 17 (2006) of the journal Illinois Archaeology. It is made available here with the permission of the publishers, the Illinois
WPA Excavations at the Mound Bottom and Pack Sites in Middle Tennessee, 1936-1940
New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee, 2016
From July 1936 to January 1937, archaeologists from the University of Tennessee directed excavations at the Pack site (40CH1) under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. Limited excavations were conducted during this time at the Mound Bottom site (40CH8). Charles Nash returned to Mound Bottom in February 1940 for additional investigations. This presentation summarized current research on the curated Mound Bottom and Pack site records and collections.
REVISITING THE CYRUS THOMAS MOUND EXPLORATIONS IN PENNSYLVANIA
Pennsylvania Archaeologist 90(2):53-63, 2020
The Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology was tasked with archaeological explorations of mounds in the Eastern United States in 1881. Cyrus Thomas was named head of the Division of Mound Exploration, and he hired assistants to conduct mound explorations in different areas east of the Mississippi River. This work was conducted between 1882 and 1890 in the Eastern United States. Thomas hired an assistant to examine mounds in Western Pennsylvania between 1885 and 1886. Several mounds were examined in the Monongahela Valley. The most famous of these was the Crall mound in Monongahela city. The mounds, burials and associated artifacts were described in Thomas’ 1894 Report of Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology. However, none of the artifacts were illustrated in his report. The only depictions of artifacts recovered were in Mayer-Oakes’1955 Prehistory of the Upper Ohio Valley in which a black-and-white photograph of a copper gorget and a fragmentary tubular pipe from Crall Mound were illustrated. A 2019 visit to the Smithsonian Institution Museum Support Center permitted the author to photograph artifacts recovered by the Thomas expedition to the Monongahela Valley. Those artifacts are described and depicted herein.
A PRESCIENT 1880 STUDY OF " THE MOUND-BUILDERS OF ARKANSAS "
The Rev. W. C. Stout (1824-1886) was born in Tennessee but grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas and traveled into “Indian Territory” (now Oklahoma) while young. He had wide interests in scholarly subjects, and became an eminent Episcopalian clergyman. During April 1880, he authored a lengthy essay on “The Mound-Builders of Arkansas,” which was published in the Arkansas Gazette over a five-day period. Using his own observations and the available ethnohistoric literature (especially two of the Hernando de Soto accounts), he correctly deduced that the mounds had been built and used, mainly in late prehistoric times, by the ancestors of the historic Indians of these regions. In this regard, he was ahead of Cyrus Thomas, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s great “Mound Survey” project, who published a similar conclusion in 1894. Here, we present a reprint of Stout’s prescient study, with updates and comments on some of the sites he mentioned and the issues he addressed.
(2019) The Jasper Allen Mound: New Insights from the Valentine Collections
North Carolina Archaeology, 2019
In December 1881, a small crew of workers led by A. J. Osborne, a local representative of the Valentine Museum of Richmond, Virginia, completely excavated a small mound on a farm owned by Daniel "Jasper" Allen near the town of Sylva in Jackson County, North Carolina. The mound is best known for a small but impressive collection of Mississippian-period artifacts housed at the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC RLA). These artifacts include two well-preserved Middle Cumberland region style negative-painted effigy bottles, shell beads, and a Tennessee-style chunkey stone that likely date to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries. In this paper I offer a summary description of archival records and artifacts associated with the Jasper Allen Mound and compare it to Mississippian sites from neighboring states with similar artifact assemblages. While they are highly problematic by today’s standards, the excavation records and surviving artifacts from the Jasper Allen Mound may provide clues for understanding social and cultural change in the Cherokee heartland of western North Carolina.
2013
Due in large part to changing river patterns, a portion of Mound A of the Shiloh Mound complex and Shiloh National Military Park is eroding into the Tennessee River. Mound A is one of the largest Mississippian period Indian mounds in the Tennessee River Valley, and one of the largest mounds on National Park Service land. The mound and village complex were built in the centuries immediately following A.D. 1000, when the site was the political and ceremonial center of a society dominating this part of the region. Engineering studies demonstrated that Mound A was seriously threatened by erosion, and that, regardless of whatever stabilization and mitigation efforts were employed, at least 25 or more feet of the mound and adjoining bluff line in the site area would be lost to erosion. The archeological project reported herein was undertaken to mitigate, in part, the damage brought about by the ongoing erosion in the vicinity of Mound A, and focused on the area of direct impact, or near-certain loss. The excavations conducted from 1999–2004 recovered information from the top to the bottom of the mound on the east side, a vertical span nearly 7 meters in height on the south end and 9 meters on the north side. Seven major construction stages and over 600 features were found in the portion of Mound A examined.The archeological investigations were multidisciplinary in nature and took place over five field seasons (1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004). Intensive remote sensing and archeological testing programs were conducted in the vicinity of Mound A and to a lesser extent elsewhere over the mound complex in 1999 and 2001. These followed by planning workshops held in mid-2000 and early 2002 involving a number of scholars and land managers to decide how to proceed. A large scale archeological mitigation program was started and partially completed from 2002–2004, with the vast majority of the fieldwork occurring in 2002 and 2003. evidence for the construction and use of Mound A found during the 1999–2004 excavations is recounted stage by stage, including occupation surfaces, structures, individual features, and major construction episodes. Geoarcheologically-based interpretations of how the mound was built and used are presented, together with analyses of the material remains found associated with each stage. These include the results of radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating, analyses of the soil chemistry of occupation surfaces and summary discussions of the lithic, ceramic, and paleosubsistence remains (i.e., carbonized plant remains, bone, phytoliths, and shell) found in the deposits. Additional analyses document the carbonized textiles found in the deposits.