Abstract
The Cumberland River Archaic of Middle Tennessee is a summary of 40 shell-bearing Archaic (SBA) sites in the Middle Cumberland River Valley (MCRV) dating between ca. 7700 and 3200 BP with a focus on several large sites. Five of its nine chapters are summaries of major MCRV SBA sites and the other four (plus an introduction) are syntheses of multiple sites addressing various topics. Much of the research presented in this book was initiated after catastrophic flooding of the Cumberland River in 2010, which impacted many of the sites discussed in this book through flood-induced erosion and intensified looting initiated by freshly exposed archaeological profiles. This book’s contributors organized emergency surveys to assess site damage and salvage data, and they disseminate much of those data here. Prior to this book, the MCRV Archaic was a little-known prehistoric phase documented primarily through technical reports, dissertations, archival documents, brief papers, museum exhibits, and word of mouth from looters and artifact hunters. This book brings these varied sources of information together and supplements them with renewed field investigations to stimulate interest in MCRV SBA sites and provide a foundation for further research.
The volume begins with an introduction by Deter-Wolf and Peres that defines and describes the MCRV, introduces the SBA site phenomenon, summarizes theoretical perspectives regarding the SBA, and presents an overview map depicting MCRV SBA site locations. The introduction also addresses several major issues with the research of MCRV SBA sites returned to throughout this volume, most notably continuing erosion and large-scale looting. The introduction makes a good case for the endangered status of MCRV SBA sites and the measures taken, as reported in this volume, to salvage information from them before they were lost to science.
Moving into the body of the volume, Chapter 1, by Deter-Wolf and Straub, presents an investigative history of MCRV SBA sites, providing narratives for eight key sites, summaries of investigative effort and site sensitivity, and several great historic photographs depicting artifacts and in situ shell deposits. The most referenced element of this chapter will likely be a summary table of all 40 known MCRV SBA sites, including locations relative to their closest stream confluence, the presence/absence of human remains, a brief description of constituents and investigative history, and a bibliography.
Chapter 2, by Peres and Deter-Wolf, is a summary of emergency surveys conducted after the 2010 Cumberland River floods, during which the authors investigated nine SBA sites. The authors sampled SBA sites by collecting shell-bearing matrix and charcoal samples from exposed profiles to provide a general understanding of site constituents and age. This chapter introduces a couple of this volume’s most important insights. First, the authors show that the majority of MCRV SBA site are within 200 m of tributary confluences and theorize that their locations were positioned to forage mollusks from rocky shoals that have since been destroyed by historic modification of the Cumberland River. Second, the authors introduce the revelation that MCRV Archaic shell deposits are dominated by Pleurocerid aquatic gastropods rather than bivalves, as previously assumed (i.e., snails not mussels).
Chapter 3, by Peres, Deter-Wolf, Ledford, Keasler, Robinson, and Wyatt, is a summary of recent archaeological testing at site 40DV7. Using auger testing, controlled test excavations, and column sampling, the authors document a 70- to 150-cm-thick SBA deposit covering an area of around 3200 m2 containing shell, fire-cracked rock, a diverse (if sparse) vertebrate faunal assemblage, and a small number of chipped stone artifacts, all dating to an occupation span of ca. 6500 to 4500 cal BP. Beyond this chapter’s empirical contributions, it provides an effective methodological framework for field investigations of these large, complex hunter-gatherer sites.
In Chapter 4, Miller, Bissett, Peres, Anderson, Carmody, and Deter-Wolf provide a geochronological framework and occupation span estimate for site 40CH171 using data from several exposed profiles and Bayesian radiocarbon date modeling. I am unfamiliar with the depositional settings found in the MCRV, so I found their site formation model for this site to be informative. Moreover, occupation span is an important piece of information gleaned from SBA sites, which were sometimes occupied continuously for thousands of years, and this chapter provides a simple model for determining occupation span that may be useful at other MCRV SBA sites.
Chapter 5, by Bissett, Carmody, and Miller, is a summary of investigations at the Barnes site (40DV307), a relatively late shell-bearing site dating to ca. 3500 to 1600 cal BP. The macrobotanical data presented in this chapter is a great empirical contribution, but I thought that the most interesting aspect of this chapter is a discussion of shell deposit formation and preservation at Barnes. Shell deposits should generally accumulate near the river’s edge, and at Barnes an abandoned river channel opposite the site suggests that the river shifted channels during the site’s occupation, which likely influenced the location of shell midden deposition. The larger implication is that changes in shell use through time may reflect shifts in channel locations rather than human behavioral change.
Chapter 6, by Morse and Peres, summarizes and augments results from 1960s investigations at the Robinson site (40SM4), one of the first systematically excavated MCRV SBA sites. Many of the results from Robinson were published in Morse’s 1967 dissertation, but Peres complements his dissertation with an updated faunal analysis. Robinson is another relatively late site, spanning ca. 3800 to 1900 cal BP, and perhaps relatedly contains an abundance of bivalve rather than gastropod remains. Robinson is most significant for the 62 human burials recovered from the site, around half of which were recovered from a localized Archaic cemetery.
Chapter 7, by Deter-Wolf and Bissett, is a reexamination of results from 1980s excavations at the Anderson site (40WM9). A Bayesian model of radiocarbon dates from Anderson firmly documents the onset of shell deposition (mostly Pleurocerid gastropods) by 7700 cal BP, making it the earliest MCRV SBA site. Besides the distinction of being the oldest, the Anderson site contains various other “superlatives” (as the authors put it), including 72 burials and one of the earliest assemblages of marine shell artifacts in the interior southeast.
In Chapter 8, Gillreath-Brown and Deter-Wolf conduct an analysis of Archaic site settlement patterns in the MCRV, largely through geospatial analysis. The authors expand their site sample to include all MCRV Archaic sites cataloged in the Tennessee Division of Archaeology’s site file database, resulting in 504 Early Archaic (ca. 11,500–8900 cal BP), 319 Middle Archaic (ca. 8900–5800 cal BP), and 843 Late Archaic (ca. 5800–3200 cal BP) sites presented in three high-quality distribution maps. Not surprisingly, the majority of MCRV Archaic sites are located within 1 km of the Cumberland River or one of its four major tributaries, and site density appears slightly biased toward urban areas with more archaeological investigations. The authors also present several spatiotemporal site density analyses (by physiographic province, subbasin, and county) that demonstrate significant site location differences between Archaic subperiods. The most interesting analysis in this chapter pertains to site reoccupation patterns between the Paleoindian and Late Archaic periods. I will not attempt to describe it here, but I thought their site reoccupation data presentation was a novel way to present a complex dataset, and I will likely adopt it for use myself.
The concluding Chapter 9, by the volume editors, summarizes the spatiotemporal distribution of SBA sites in the MCRV, as well as problems and prospects of historic and continuing research. This chapter’s pair of figures showing dated site locations and occupation spans are handy references that I suspect will show up in conference presentation for many years to come. The authors introduce a couple of higher level theoretical concepts for the first time in this chapter, including a brief discussion of optimal foraging theory and the notion that Archaic foragers may have promoted Pleurocerid population health as an unintentional byproduct of settling nearby, but also intentionally by stabilizing nearby riverbanks. This chapter does what any concluding chapter should by calling attention to historical research inadequacies, highlighting how their approach contributes to correcting them, and introducing big ideas to be tested during future research.
I was particularly impressed by two aspects of this book. First, the contributors’ efforts to document, sample, and report sites impacted by the 2010 floods is a model example of archaeological practice worthy of emulation by any archaeologist invested in public outreach and historic preservation. The contributors combine historic preservation, academic archaeology, and public engagement seamlessly into a truly great project that engaged a large diversity of stakeholders, and it is reported well in this book. When faced with massive destruction of this record, the authors chose to use it as an opportunity rather than a cause for lamentation, and for that they deserve an award.
Second, these sites are bigger and much earlier than I expected as a largely Western archaeologist, and the authors do a great job of summarizing them for a novice of this record. I ended this book humbled by my lack of knowledge that these sites existed and my relatively sparse High Plains artifact counts. No one practicing hunter-gather archaeology in the Intermountain West finds, for example, a 7000-year-old cemetery containing 72 individuals or a shell midden containing an estimated 350,000,000 aquatic gastropod shells. Relatedly, I was reminded that the southeast’s cultural historical periods are offset toward the present from the Intermountain West’s by several thousand years. For example, the southeast’s “Middle Archaic,” to which the earliest MCRV SBA sites belong, begins during the High Plains’ “Late Paleoindian” around 8900 cal BP. In other words, as foragers in the southeast were fully invested in a broad-spectrum subsistence system focused on molluscan fauna, dabbling in long-distance trade, and creating actual cemeteries, High Plains hunter-gatherers were still mostly hunting large game and only starting to experiment with storing food, processing plants, and hunting animals smaller than deer. For those of us who view cultural evolution as a process of resource intensification, the SBA sites presented in this volume are a potent reminder that the American southeast was several thousand years ahead of much of the Western hemisphere from a very early time, a process that of course culminated in complex horticultural societies late in prehistory.
Despite its many strengths, I ended this book wanting some basic empirical information that is not presented. First, this book does not provide shell deposit profiles nor three-dimensional renderings of their shapes, though data collected as part of this study would appear to make both possible. I appreciate the authors’ conservatism in resisting the “midden versus mound” debate surrounding these shell deposits, but I think there is enough information in these studies to merit a discussion of their systemic depositional contexts.
Second, and I am showing my bias as a hunter-gatherer archaeologist here, I would have appreciated a more thorough exploration of Pleurocerid gastropods in the diets of MCRV foragers beyond that which is presented briefly in the concluding chapter. How were aquatic snails prepared and consumed, and how many made a meal based on calorie and nutrient content? If the editors do not think optimal foraging models can explain this phenomenon (as they suggest in Chapter 9), can we see a formal test of this notion or an alternative theoretical framework? Most importantly, can we please see photos of the editors eating aquatic snails straight from their shells? The Pleurocerids are a fascinating aspect of MCRV subsistence rife with potential for ongoing research. I look forward to seeing such studies in the future.
To conclude, this book is a must for all southeastern archaeologists and highly recommended for researchers invested in the study of resource intensification in general. The sites reported in this volume comprise a large portion of southeastern prehistory, both temporally and spatially, that has thus far been underreported and largely misunderstood. It seems to me that any discussion of southeastern prehistory would be incomplete without mentioning SBA sites in the Middle Cumberland River Valley. This book may find a larger audience in those interested in resource intensification dynamics cross-culturally. In aggregate, these shell-bearing sites are a classic example of forager subsistence intensification, the process through which complex societies arose throughout the world. The MCRV presents a rare glimpse into how this process arose and evolved toward increasing levels of social complexity, where elsewhere sites of this sort may have become obscured or destroyed by the landscape modifications of complex horticulturalists.