Heading for the Hills: The Middle Cumberland Region to Upper Tennessee Valley Migration

Summary

By 1300 CE, the people of the Middle Cumberland region were on the move, a migration related at least in part to climatic instability including multiple drought episodes. Numerous types of evidence suggest that some of these migrants went to East Tennessee. We discuss possible material culture evidence for this migration from several East Tennessee sites, but with an emphasis on the Long Island site, now located in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar reservoir and near the base of the Cumberland Plateau. Excavations at the site by the Smithsonian in the late nineteenth century recovered a Middle Cumberland-style statue from a platform mound. Excavations in 1941, by Works Progress Administration crews supervised by University of Tennessee archaeologists, recovered pottery samples with some Middle Cumberland characteristics from three platform mounds and a large wall-trench structure near these mounds. Our study of the statue, pottery, and related artifacts and features from Long Island provides insights to the nature of the Middle Cumberland influence at this site and potentially at other sites in the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20520