Friday, July 9, 2010
Phillips The Start of the Bells Bend Paleo-Indian Archaeological Study (Try Saying That Three Times Fast)
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 10:52 AM
- Hopefully our archaeologists will be careful to avoid this, or at the least, take it to Ashland City.
The thing that was really cool is that, even though these folks have already been out on other digs this summer and it's already hot July, the excitement they feel about being here is obvious.
So if you go to the park, you will have the rare opportunity to see the very preliminary stages of an archaeological study. They have some good reasons to believe that there's stuff in the Bend that will blow their minds and answer all kinds of questions they have. But this month is about trying to figure out where to look for the stuff and to get an idea of the scope of what they might find.
They're going out to look at a lot of places and take samples for radio-carbon dating and such. Basically, we have in the Bend right now some of the best and the brightest Paleo-Indian archaeologists poking around. If they start to find stuff, not only will they come back and do the kinds of digs you're familiar with from TV and movies, but people who specialize in pollen or climate change or textile or ancient mammals or whatever will also make their way here.
This is a chance to see the early hard work that goes into discovering valuable sites.
So what do they hope might be here?
When David Anderson, from UT-Knoxville, started the evening, he joked that the 25 people on the project were all "here to help Shane Miller come up with a dissertation project." No pressure there, Mr. Miller. Just take a bunch of money, bring a bunch of people out to a place most of them have never been before, and hope y'all find something. Ha, whew, I hope for his sake, they find something.
Miller actually spoke for most of the evening. The thing he explained is that people (regular people, mostly) have found a ton of Paleo-Indian artifacts in the southeast (these are folks who would have been here right at the end of the last ice age). He said you could probably find more spear tips of more variety in two counties in Tennessee than you could in all of New Mexico. And, frankly, people have.
But, like I said, these are just regular people who are finding these spear tips or cutting tools or arrowheads in their fields or when out fishing or walking creeks. So, they pick them up, take them home, wash them off and later, maybe, archaeologists show up to drool over them and take pictures and notes. Very few archaeological studies have been done on the Paleo-Indians in the Southeast.
So they know there's all this great stuff here, more than they've gotten in any other parts of the country. But they haven't had the chance to see any of it actually in the ground, where they can see if the spear tips lie with certain bones or if a rock that might have been used to beat wood into shape is found near other tools that could confirm its use. They haven't been able to take pollen samples from the dirt or see if they can find evidence of campfires, trash heaps or other things that would tell them about the lives of the Paleo-Indians.
They're hoping to find such a site in the Bend. They believe that one could exist for a couple of reasons. One, usually, once a city is built over an area, you stop finding a lot of ancient objects, just because they end up under a lot of concrete. But Nashville keeps throwing up Clovis points (a type of Paleo-Indian spear tip). It's an anomaly among cities, they speculate, because of the geography of the place. This may have just been a great place for many people to live for a long time, so there are just a ton of artifacts here.
Second, state and local archaeologists have already identified two Paleo-Indian sites in Bells Bend, up closer to the Ashland City Highway. If there's evidence of Paleo-Indian people living in the Bend, these archaeologists hope that they can find another site in the park.
They kept repeating that our area is one of the richest places and one of the least studied. They hope to rectify that.
To that end, as I said before, they've got a website. And they're asking that, if you have any Native American artifacts, that you bring them by for the archaeologists to look at. They stressed that they are not the arrowhead police or anything. But they'd really, really like to get a sense of what kinds of things people have found in our area.
They will be out there every weekday in the morning (6 a.m.-noon to work before it gets too hot) and also be doing lectures Monday through Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Bells Bend Nature Center on all matter of archaeological stuff. And at the end of their time here, they'll present a lecture on what they've found. Which will hopefully be something — not just for the sake of Shane Miller's dissertation, but because it'd be awesome in general.
Comments (10)
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there was no mention of involvement with or consultation by a related tribe, which, considering the time horizon and location, could only be the Muscogee (Creek) nation in Oklahoma and their Yuchi elders and leaders.
no mention of their policy if they find burials, either. will they back off and consult with tribal officers then? what kind of security would a burial be given to protect it from being looted? will they have a Muscogee nation monitor on site to verify the burials are respected and protected?
a real monitor can't be someone who's family says they have a little Indian blood. it should only be an enrolled member of the federally recognized tribal government with the closest historical/cultural relationship to the site.
and no mention of what tribal people in Oklahoma they will consult with before they present their lecture. how can they interpret what they find without a cultural context? previous archaeological reports don't have that cultural context.
too many academic archaeologists are "proud" that they don't know a single native elder. they think it would effect their "objectivity." what it does is leave them searching for context with no reference points. there's a lot of stuff in print, including recent publications, where the authors are oh so certain and oh so wrong. actually meeting with native elders, in this case Yuchi and Muscogee, would give them a better chance of getting closer to the facts. as one Yuchi friend tells me all the time, you can't interpret 10th century sites with 21st century eyes.
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Perhaps I missed this on their website, but do they have some sort of schedule for what topics the various lectures will be covering?
Awesome. I've seen a couple of private artifact collections of residents out there and they are quite impressive, and am also familiar with some of the larger sites like the stone box grave that was found out there years ago. Also, all of this work and the potential that it has to uncover some real treasures will go a long way to deter future May Towns. Especially if the research leads to a National Register of Historic Places archaeological district determination.
escaswv cvpko, at one time I was an archaeology student and worked in the field for several years. I NEVER heard a single archaeologist disdain knowledge from tribal peoples or claim that such interaction would be counter-productive. Did some not take it as seriously as they should have? Sure, but that was a long time ago, and things have changed a great deal in the field. And, even then, some took it seriously. On the other hand, some -- not all, but some -- NAs believe that oral traditions trump science, hands down, no room for discussion. I have an NA acquaintance who refuses to entertain the notion of the migration over the Bering Strait, claiming that NAs were "always" here and didn't come from somewhere else. This, despite decades and decades of science that show very clearly that the migration took place.
Also, the truth is that just because a tribe occupied a certain area at the time of European contact doesn't mean that that tribe, those traditions, existed on that spot back to the beginning of time. People move around, one group conquers another, groups disappear entirely and leave no information behind because there's no one left to tell the stories in the oral tradition. The people occupying this area during the Paleo period, who left freaking CLOVIS points around fergodssake, could very possibly have no relation to the NAs who were here when the settlers moved in. The concept of "tribes" at the time of contact at currently likely didn't even exist during the Paleo period.
Should NAs in the area be involved in any dig like this? Sure, absolutely. Should we take at face value every interpretation they make? No. Not only for the reasons stated above, but because even if it is the right people in the right place with the right oral traditions, so very much has been lost over the centuries that even those NAs have only part of the picture. Languages have died or been seriously altered or limited, and if you aren't fluent in the language you only have a piece of how a people thought and lived. Stories are gone, dances are gone, lifeways are gone. Whatever survives is valuable, and every effort must be made to preserve what is left. But it's important to understand that what we have today is just a fragment of what once was. It can help the archaeology, but the archaeology can also help with the understanding and preservation, perhaps adding a piece to the puzzle that we didn't have before.
escaswv cvpko, I don't think that's the case. Paleo-Indians were here before 8,000 b.c.e. The Muscogee have been here since at least the end of the Mound Building era, which ended roughly at the same time Europeans arrived. But that still leaves 7,000 years between the Paleo-Indians and the Muscogee. Of course the Paleo-Indians are the ancestors of the Muscogee, but we don't know much about their migratory patterns, how wide-spread family groups and clans were, and we have little, if any, way of knowing how they identified themselves, whether they organized themselves into tribes or not.
That being said, with the involvement of UT and funding from Metro, federal laws apply, which means that, if human remains are discovered, there are laws guiding how they're handled. My understanding from my discussions with a contact at the Muscogee nation last year is that the Muscogee do consider anyone in the Bend who is not non-Indian to be of concern to them and they do, when they can, become involved with the treatment of human remains.
It is, however, often difficult for the Muscogee to prove that they meet the state's legal requirement of "persons of interest," in these cases. See TDOT v. Medicine Bird Black Bear White Eagle, et al, concerning those kids who are now under OHB and Hillsboro Pike.
Anyway, I think it's important to gather insights from people who are of the culture one is looking at (and even to respect their desires to not be studied), but I think that we have to be careful about perpetuating the idea that the people who were in this area in 1500 were culturally unchanged from the people who were here eight thousand years before that; that's just inaccurate. People who were hunting and gathering and just kind of figuring out cultivation at a time when there were at least three different kinds of hairy elephants roaming the continent are very, very different people than those with advanced, settled civilizations full of cities, trade routes, and complex religious centers.
They aren't interchangeable. They have insights into the lives of their ancestors that outsiders don't. But I don't think it's right for people who are not Native American to draw any conclusions further than that.
The Muscogee know that there are archaeological sites in Bells Bend. They know there are probably human remains out there. And they know, if only because I've called and talked to them about it, that there's archaeological interest in the Bend. I don't think it's my place to question whether they are involved to a level I find satisfactory after that. They watch closely what goes on in the Bend. Just because no representative was introduced at the lecture doesn't mean that something untoward is going on (nor does it mean that there's not). I don't think it's fair to draw any conclusions because no one was introduced. They're not obligated to show up and play "Wise Indian Representative of all Native Americans."
NM, I don't think they do yet have a schedule, but they said they'd be putting one up.
We bought our last house from a guy who had a farm in Bordeaux but raised his family in a Green Hills house he bought in 1942. In the Green Hills yard, we discovered maybe a half-dozen stone knives, arrow points, pounding stones and scrapers over the years. They were usually set on a stone at the corner of the garden, or along a border. I assumed the owner found them on the property, but maybe they were Bordeaux origin. Goodness knows where they are now...
Since there were several tribes with historical presence in this part of Middle Tennessee- Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Muscogee- ALL of them should be notified. The Chickasaws took authority over graves disinterred at the site of the West Nashville Wal-mart/Loew's directly across the river from Bell's Bend. Since those graves were between 1100-800 years old, it is likely that they could be closely related to those who lived on Bell's Bend. In that case, the Chickasaws have already established authority and could most likely assert such over any remains found during this project.
The biggest worry I have are the looters who have plagued Bell's Bend for years. There's some guy right now who comes in at night from the river and has been digging in the areas along and directly above the banks. Years ago we fought to get the Army Corps of Engineers to post the site at the ferry landing. It's hard to get local law enforcement to take seriously the fact that looting Native graves and archeological sites IS a crime, albeit a misdemeanor. Looters damage sites and rob all of us of a part of our heritage.
@ Allison S - Unfortunately under Tennessee state law it is not illegal for people to dig archaeological sites on private property as long as they have permission of the landowner. The important exception to this concerns graves: it is a FELONY under state law to disturb human remains, graves, and associated artifacts or burial monuments, whether ancient or modern, without a court order. On the other hand, it is a violation of Federal law to do any artifact collecting or digging on land owned by agencies like the Corps of Engineers, National Parks Service, etc.
What will these archaeologists do if they find evidence of human remains? I know firsthand (since I know them well) that they will stop immediately, do very preliminary investigation to get only enough essential material, then contact all appropriate officials under the guidelines of NAGPRA, the very rigorous, umbrella Native American Graves law (NAGPRA). In fact, I believe the head of this research, Dr. David Anderson, would be especially rigorous about such respectful responses. Note his guidelines for dealing with similar finds -- and any artifacts that would have special cultural or spiritual significance to existing tribes -- in his guidelines for the 20 years of research he did at Fort Polk, LA. (http://books.google.com/books?id=IVmw67Ey7…).
Note what happens when architects are faithful to such requirements: Basically their work in that spot has to come to all but a total halt! I've heard of research being stopped for even two years while NAGPRA provisions were worked out. Sometimes the delay is the very issue of settling exactly which tribe has authority, a difficult question when you are rooted in prehistory, as noted above. But archaeologists are not like the Brits who, basically, looted Egyptian sites for souvenirs for their benefactors. Archaeologists today are focussed on the total fabric of society, pat and present, and they gain nothing by insulting or angering the possible descendants of the very people they want to study. More typically, they consider those relationships synergistic.
If you want to aim your legitimate anger somewhere, find the looters, who care only for themselves. Or go research what the mayor of Oxford, AL, is doing, tearing up the largest Indian mound in Alabama to get dirt for a site where he hopes to woo a Sam's Club, and ripping apart an exquisite Mississippian culture community site to build ball fields. There, the Corps of Engineers have put a stop to it, because the bulldozers unearthed human remains and, well, nobody quite knows what they did with them!
I was at the Bell's Bend boat ramp Saturday morning and saw a pontoon boat anchored just downriver from the launch ramp. There were two people walking up and down the bank obviously looking for artifacts. Is this considered looting and if so, who should be notified if I see this activity again?
