Archaeology of the Nucor Steel Project, Meade County, Kentucky

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Nucor Steel Corporation planned and built a major steel recycling facility on the south bank of Ohio River at a location that turned out to be loaded with prehistoric and historic archaeological sites. From 2019 through 2023, Burns & McDonnell undertook archaeological investigations there in the form of survey, test excavation, and site mitigation. This paper reviews those investigations, focusing on findings from two sites where full-scale archaeological excavations took place. Site 15Md458 contained numerous Wyandotte chert flintknapping workshops interspersed with buildings and middens of the historic Glen Fount Plantation. The Craven Crawdad Site (15Md475) was found buried 2 meters below the floor of the Ohio River valley, and it contained two stratified Early Woodland components that represent short-term occupations focusing on the production of Adena point preforms. The Nucor Project provided the opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of deep testing as a site delineation method, and of techniques for working safely in deep block excavations. Archaeological conclusions address the locally overwhelming Early Woodland presence, the inscrutable lure of Wyandotte chert, and the Constricted Valley of the Ohio River as an archaeological sub-region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39650.0