The Shell-Bearing Archaic in the Middle Cumberland River Valley

Abstract

The Middle Cumberland River Valley (MCRV) of Tennessee comprises a unique regional environment that has continually supported human occupation along the natural river levees and adjacent terrace landforms since the Late Pleistocene. Over thousands of years Archaic period inhabitants of the MCRV harvested the invertebrate species that populated the streams and waterways of the region, using them for subsistence and raw materials and taking an active role in managing the riverine resources. The cumulative result of this process appears in the archaeological record as abundant and often-dense deposits of invertebrate zooarchaeological remains. However, few formal archaeological investigations have been conducted on Archaic shell-bearing sites in the region. In this field report we present initial results of site file analysis, radiocarbon dating, and species composition research in order to introduce the MCRV manifestation of the cultural phase traditionally known as the Shell Mound Archaic.

Keywords:

• Shell Mound Archaic
• Shell midden
• Zooarchaeology
• Cumberland River

Acknowledgments

Processing of AMS samples was funded by the Tennessee Historical Commission, Tennessee Division of Archaeology, and the Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) Zooarchaeology Research Fund. The 2010 fieldwork was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1048351, awarded to the authors and Shannon Hodge. The 2012 fieldwork at site 40DV7 was supported in part by the MTSU Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the MTSU Office of the Provost. We are grateful to Dan Allen for permission to cite his unpublished paper. We also wish to acknowledge the efforts of Ryan Robinson, Kelly Ledford, Joey Keasler, and the students, volunteers, avocational archaeologists, and colleagues who assisted with our research. Finally, we thank Mike Moore, Cheryl Claassen, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Data Availability Statement

Data from the 2010 NSF-funded RAPID survey are curated at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology in Nashville and have been uploaded to the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR, http://core.tdar.org/). The Project Outcomes Report for that survey is available at http://www.research.gov/.

Note on Contributor

Tanya M. Peres (PhD, University of Florida 2001; MA, Florida State University 1997; BA Florida State University 1995) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology faculty at Florida State University. She is interested in the relationships between humans and their environments, and humans and animals - especially in terms of subsistence and how animals were incorporated into the native worldview beyond food. She has conducted research in the southeastern U.S., Gulf Coastal Mexico, Central Pacific Panama, and the Scottish Highlands.

Aaron Deter-Wolf is a Prehistoric Archaeologist for the State of Tennessee's Division of Archaeology, where he is responsible for managing prehistoric sites on State-owned lands, investigating disturbances to prehistoric human remains, conducting archaeological excavations and research, and informing the public about archaeology. He holds a BA from Duke University and earned his MA from Tulane University in 2000.

Notes

1 Traditionally, prehistoric sites containing large concentrations of freshwater mollusks have been identified as shell mounds or shell middens. Shell mound implies deliberate construction or architecture for domestic or ritual purposes, whereas shell midden implies food waste and/or domestic habitation. However, to assign such functionally loaded terms to sites that have not been subjected to extensive, research-driven modern excavations confuses issues surrounding their formation. Thus, for our work in the Middle Cumberland River Valley, we prefer to use the functionally neutral, but adequately descriptive term shell-bearing.

2 Radiocarbon dates in the text of this article, including those first reported elsewhere and by other authors, are presented here as calibrated B.C./A.D. using OxCal 4.2.4/INTcal 2013 (Reimer et al. 2013).

3 The Middle Cumberland River Valley is a geographic designation and should not be confused with the Middle Cumberland Region or Middle Cumberland Culture. These other terms reference a regional Mississippian period cultural tradition defined in part by distinctive mortuary practices, artistic styles, and ceramic typologies (Moore et al. 2006; Moore and Smith 2009).