The Potential for Intact Paleoindian Deposits in the Middle Tennessee Valley: A Review of the Literature with Recent Data from Redstone Arsenal

ABSTRACT

While renowned for its dense concentration of Paleoindian sites, the Middle Tennessee Valley has largely been disregarded as being too deflated to contain significant intact deposits. Recent geomorphological data from northern Alabama are helping to winnow down the depositional haystack to zero-in on portions of landforms that are most likely to harbor intact strata from the end of the Pleistocene. A new look at old landforms suggests that the karst landscape of the Middle Tennessee Valley may yet hold some surprises, and that intact early cultural deposits can show up in some unexpected places, including heavily cultivated uplands.

KEYWORDS:

• Paleoindian archaeology
• geoarchaeology
• Tennessee Valley

Author biography

Ben Hoksbergen received his MA in Anthropology at Iowa State University in 2004 and has been employed in cultural resource management for 25 years. He is currently Cultural Resource Manager at Redstone Arsenal and Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).