Archaeology at Shiloh Indian Mounds, 1899-1999

1 / Introduction

Acknowledgments This book is a modi¤ed version of a report submitted to the Southeast Archeological Center (SEAC) of the National Park Service. To ensure that the information about Shiloh Indian Mounds be available to the archaeological public, SEAC agreed to let me submit the report for publication. This book corrects several minor errors in the SEAC report, omits site-management recommendations and the most excruciating details about preparing the site map, includes newly available (but frustratingly ambiguous) information about excavations by the Park Commissioners in the early 1900s, excludes several lengthy tables and data appendixes, and has an expanded consideration of Shiloh’s regional setting in the ¤nal chapter. Many individuals over the course of four years contributed to this report, and it is my pleasure to acknowledge their contributions. The research reported here was funded by: the CUNY-PSC Faculty Research Award Program , grant nos. 66444-0000 and 69491-0029; a Queens College FacultyMentored Undergraduate Research award; the Department of Anthropology at Queens College, which contributed one course release to give me time to¤nish the lab work and start writing; a Smithsonian Institution Short-term Visitor Grant; a grant from the National Park Service’s Lower Mississippi Valley Regional Initiative; and three contracts with the National Park Service, nos. 1443PX589098056, 1443PX589098057, and 1443PX532099201. The 1998 excavation at Shiloh N.M.P . was carried out under ARPA Permit SHIL 98-001. My work at Shiloh has been consistently supported, and made enjoyable, by Superintendent Woody Harrell and his staff. At the NPS Southeast Archeological Center in Tallahassee, I received encouragement, support, and patience from Bennie Keel, George Smith, and the center’s head, John Ehrenhard. Fieldwork was carried out with the assistance of a number of people who tolerated some exceedingly hot days. I had the good fortune to have Caroline Steele with me during preliminary reconnaissance and ¤eld survey of Shiloh Phase sites in 1996. In both 1998 and 1999 I was assisted by Jennifer Flood, a CUNY graduate student. Patrick Livingood, a University of Michigan graduate student, helped enormously in the ¤eld in 1998, taking on all the surveying chores among other things. Other members of the ¤eld crews in 1998 and 1999 were Lisa Brando, Tony Castillo, Lazo Dubravko, Adam Harrell, Vanessa Joseph, Herbert LaCuesta, Kerry McMahon, Rob Menke, Marc Meyer, and Kristi Taft. I am lucky to have had John Cornelison and David Anderson directing the SEAC ¤eldwork in 1999, reported in Chapter 7. Their professionalism and dauntingly hard work accomplished far more in two weeks than I had considered possible. I am deeply in debt to them and to John’s excellently trained ¤eld crew. David and John also read the full draft of this report. Their comments along with those by George Smith and Bennie Keel made my contract report a better, and certainly more understandable, document. The recommendations of Lynne Sullivan, Timothy Pauketat, and an anonymous reviewer helped turn that contract report into a more readable and useful book (though I know they do not agree with everything I say in it). Other individuals who have helped along the way include John Ross and Ken Hansgen in Savannah and Stacy Allen, Tim Smith, and Brian McCutchen at Shiloh National Park. Suzanne Hoyal of the Tennessee Division of Archaeology searched the state site ¤le for Mississippian mounds east of Shiloh. In New York, Regina Caul¤eld of the Of¤ce of Sponsored Research and Programs at Queens College, CUNY, was an invaluable ally in untangling paperwork snafus. The chair of my department at Queens, James Moore, consistently supported my work and did everything he could to minimize the substantial mess created by a forced move of the archaeology lab from one building to another while I was writing this report. Rob Menke, Kimberly Schaeffer, Kerry McMahon, and Vanessa Joseph put in countless hours washing , sorting, counting, weighing, bagging, and labeling the 60,000 items from the 1998 and 1999 excavations. xiv Acknowledgments Archaeology at Shiloh Indian Mounds, 1899–1999 1 Introduction The Shiloh Indian Mounds archaeological site is a late prehistoric community within the boundary of the Shiloh National Military Park, where one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War was fought in April 1862. The Indian Mounds site is, in its own right, a National Historic Landmark. For over a century the site has been described...