Native American

The late prehistoric cultures of the southeastern United States dating from ca. A.D. 900 to 1600 comprise the Mississippian culture. In general, Mississippian culture is divided chronologically into emergent, early, and late periods. Based on differences in culture traits, particularly…

Almost one thousand years ago, a thriving city of several thousand Native Americans was situated in a bend of the Harpeth River not far downstream from Kingston Springs in Cheatham County. Around A.D. 950 Mound Bottom emerged as a sacred…

Animal trails crisscrossed the Tennessee region long before the arrival of humans, and the same large game animals that created the trails attracted prehistoric hunters. Early trails tended to follow lines of least resistance, avoiding heavy undergrowth, rough ground, or…

A prominent eighteenth-century Overhill Cherokee civil and military leader, Oconastota resided at Chota on the Little Tennessee River in present-day Monroe County. He was born around 1710. By the 1740s he had acquired the title Great Warrior of Chota. His…

The Old Stone Fort State Park in Coffee County preserves a prehistoric enclosure consisting of embankments or "walls" constructed of undressed stacked or piled stone covered with earth. They circumscribe a fifty-acre plateau at the forks of the Duck River.…

The term Overhill Cherokee refers to the settlements of the eighteenth-century Cherokee people found in eastern Tennessee. The name Overhill is generally derived from the geographic location of the Cherokees and the need to travel over the mountains from South…

We do not know exactly when the first people entered the "New World" from Asia. However, we do have confidence that they had reached what is now Tennessee at the end of the last Ice Age (the Pleistocene) some 13,000…

The largest Middle Woodland Period (ca. 200 B.C.-A.D. 400) archaeological site in the Southeast, Pinson Mounds is located about ten miles south of Jackson on the South Fork of the Forked Deer River. Within an area of approximately four hundred…

In 1979 a caver exploring a narrow subterranean passageway in southeastern Tennessee noticed scratches and lines in mudbanks that lined the cave walls. He reported the marks to Charles Faulkner of the University of Tennessee, who identified them as prehistoric…

Art in its broadest definition is patterned application of human skill that evokes a feeling of aesthetic sensibility. As such, art is a universal of human culture and can be traced archaeologically to at least forty thousand years ago. Art…

More than seven thousand deep caves have been recorded throughout Tennessee. Concentrated in the limestone uplands of Middle and East Tennessee, these karsts extend from the Mammoth Cave area of central Kentucky through Tennessee into northern Alabama, and they represent…

Located five miles northeast of Cleveland in Bradley County, Rattlesnake Springs in 1938 served as the site of the last council of the eastern band of the Cherokees, where approximately thirteen thousand Native Americans assembled to begin the long journey…

Red Clay State Historic Park, located twelve miles south of Cleveland, was the site of the last seat of Cherokee government before their forced removal by federal troops along the Trail of Tears. From 1832 to 1837 it was the…

Before the steamboat, Tennesseans navigated the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee Rivers and their tributaries in canoes, keelboats, flatboats, and rafts. The original Tennessee rivermen were Cherokees, Shawnees, and other Indians paddling their sleek wooden dugout canoes and cruder "bullboats" (made…

John Ross, son of Daniel and Mollie McDonald Ross, was born in the fall of 1790 in present-day Cherokee County, Alabama. At the age of seven, the Ross family settled in southern Tennessee near the northern end of Lookout Mountain.…

Sequoyah, the originator of the Cherokee syllabary, was born in the Cherokee town of Tuskegee (or Taskigi) on the Little Tennessee River in what is now Monroe County. The son of Nathaniel Gist (or Guess), a Virginia fur trader, and…

The Shawnees, the most southerly located of all the Algonquian tribes, are one of several tribes who speak the Central Algonquian dialect. In most Algonquian languages they are called Shawunogi, which literally translates as "Southerners." Legends indicate that they were…

Located southwest of downtown Memphis off Tennessee Highway 61, T. O. Fuller State Park, established in 1933, is the nation's second oldest state park created for use by African Americans. The park currently contains 1,138 acres and includes Chucalissa Indian…

Toqua was an eighteenth-century Overhill Cherokee village located on the Little Tennessee River in present day Monroe County. Toqua means "place of a mythic great fish." Toqua (site 40MR6) also designates a late Mississippian Dallas culture (ca. A.D. 1200-1600) village…

The Trail of Tears (or Nunna-da-ul-tsun-yi in the Cherokee language: "the place were they cried"), next to the practice of black slavery, is arguably the most tragic story in Tennessee history. Covering the period from May 1838 to March 1839,…