Afternoon Program

In 2024, amateur and professional archaeologists associated with the University of Tennessee Cave Archaeology Research Team visited twelve cave and open-air rock art localities in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama.  Some were new sites documented for the first time.  Others were known sites where new technologies for documentation were used to acquire modern data.  Of these, four are on public lands and eight on private properties. In this presentation, we discuss work at six of these rock art localities.  Of three open-air sites in Tennessee, one containing cupules is a new find, illustrated here for the first time.  New faded pictographs were seen at a previously known petroglyph site in Tennessee. A new mud glyph cave art site in Alabama just across the Tennessee state line is presented along with new mud glyphs from a Tennessee cave where pictographs were documented a number of years ago.  Finally, a small shelter petroglyph site in southwestern Kentucky saw new documentation in more complete fashion than in earlier recordings.

Recent excavations by Cultural Resource Analysts, Inc., and the University of Tennessee investigated remains of a Civil War rifle trench constructed and occupied by the Army of the Ohio as part of the defenses of Knoxville in November to December 1863. This paper discusses the findings from this feature in relation to accounts of the battle, overall defenses of the city, and similar features at other sites in the region.  

Civilian Conservation Corps Camp #3459, known as Camp Dunbar, was established in 1935 in conjunction with the TVA village that housed workers for the Pickwick Dam. The primary task for the enrollees at Camp Dunbar, a segregated African American unit, was the construction of cabins for the TVA park that would later become Pickwick Landing State Park. The goal of archaeological testing at Camp Dunbar was to identify the camp building sites and activity areas. Testing of the site consisted of excavation units, shovel tests, and metal detector scans. Follow up testing and mapping will be completed in the spring.  

Stable isotope analysis has been a popular method for studying foodways within Zooarchaeology. Recently, archaeologists have begun to use stable isotope analysis to study plant remains. This type of research is currently primarily focused on understanding agriculture in prehistoric contexts, but there are many other potential applications. This paper uses stable isotope analysis to determine if people enslaved at the Fanny Dickins plantation (40FY303) in Fayette County were using manure as fertilizer for plants that they would have cultivated for their own food needs. Additionally, this project will compare δ15N values at Fanny Dickins to δ15N values from Cedar Grove (40FY325), another enslaved domestic site, and Widow Dickins (40FY462), a manor house site, to determine what plant management practices looked like on other parts of this landscape. This project demonstrates that stable isotope analysis is valuable for understanding how people used plant management practices to meet their subsistence needs.

In 2020, cavers discovered an extensive maze of previously unknown passages in Helms Deep Cave, Perry County, with abundant evidence for Indigenous exploration. The site was evaluated in May 2021, with field work between July 2021 and March 2024. Radiocarbon dates place the exploration from about 3400 BP to 3000 BP. The distribution of cane charcoal deposits and stoke marks suggests ten miles of passages were visited. Over fifty extant stone structures likely served as trail markers. There are several human footprints/pathways, with impressions from both children and adults. Two areas of cave art have abstract digital designs on cave ceilings. The 66-mile-long cave was securely gated in Spring 2024.   

TRC Environmental Corporation (TRC) was contracted by the Andrew Jackson Foundation (AJF) to aid in locating the enslaved persons cemetery at The Hermitage. Poorly marked, and placed in marginal areas, enslaved cemeteries in Middle Tennessee and across the country are regularly forgotten. Finding the enslaved cemetery at The Hermitage has been a goal of both archaeologists and historians since the early 1980s. In 2023, funding from an anonymous donor enabled the AJF to bring significant resources to the search. To reach this goal, the AJF reached out to TRC and the Vanderbilt Institute of Spatial Research to help develop methods needed to locate the enslaved cemetery. These methods included georeferencing historic maps, conducting geophysical investigations, and ground truthing anomalies suspected to be burials by identifying grave shafts.

In 2022, Corn Island Archaeology (now HMB Professional Engineers LLC) conducted a Phase III archaeological investigation at the Governors Landing site (15KN305), a site identified in 2002 as a Late Woodland, Hamilton Phase site. This investigation produced C14 dates that confirmed the primary occupation and the midden at the site as Late Woodland, with a minor Early Woodland occupation. Excavations recovered a wide array of ceramics both from feature and midden contexts. In each of these contexts coarse quartzite tempered ceramics (conforming to descriptions for Watts Barr and Swannanoa ceramics) were found to co-occur in significant quantities with limestone tempered sherds (conforming to descriptions of Candy Creek ceramics). This finding casts some doubt on the universality of quartzite tempered ceramics being a predominantly Early and Middle Woodland phenomenon in evidence elsewhere in east Tennessee.