Mound Bottom in Recorded History
Early Tennessee historian John Haywood noted Mound Bottom's importance as an aboriginal site in 1823, and early settlers reported seeing large fortifications and towers at the site. In the late 1860s, Joseph Jones of the Smithsonian Institution investigated several prehistoric sites in Tennessee, and reported "extraordinary aboriginal works" at Mound Bottom.
In 1923, William E. Myer, also working with the Smithsonian, carried out the first modern investigation of the Mound Bottom site. Myer uncovered evidence of a structure and hearth atop one of the mounds at the Pack site and evidence of 10 ancient houses at Mound Bottom. Tennessee state archaeologist P.E. Cox followed up on Myer's finds in 1926, uncovering a number of burials and baked clay floors. In the 1930s and early 1940s, excavations conducted by the University of Tennessee uncovered several house sites, graves, and sections of the palisade.
In 1972, the State of Tennessee purchased the Mound Bottom site to preserve it as a state archaeological area. The Tennessee Division of Archaeology dispatched Carl Kuttruff and Michael O'Brien to conduct major excavations at Mound Bottom in 1974 and 1975. Kutruff and O'Brien discovered another clay floor and excavated more of the palisade and a row of houses. A radiocarbon date showed that the Mound Bottom site was occupied as early as 800 AD
Over the years, various movements to establish a state archaeological park at Mound Bottom arose and fizzled. In 2004, Harpeth River State Park was organized as a "linear park" connecting several archaeological, historical, and natural areas along the lower Harpeth, including Mound Bottom. The site is closed to the public, although guided tours are available by request during the winter months.
Read more about this topic: Mound Bottom
Famous quotes containing the words mound, bottom, recorded and/or history:
“A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)