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185 12 In Eastern North America, systematic archaeology in big caves with miles of dark zone began during the 1960s. Research goals, research techniques, and interpretative frameworks have changed significantly over the past 50 years. The 50 years began in 1963 when Joe Caldwell— then Head Curator of Anthropology at the Illinois State Museum—refused to undertake an archaeological study of Salts Cave, Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky. Instead he offered me $300 from the Museum Society and the help of his Assistant Curator, Bob Hall, if I would direct the work myself (Watson 1999, 288–89). So the Cave Research Foundation Archeological Project was born (figure 12.1). Bob Hall was a wonderful colleague, and a natural-born caver. He arrived at the Cave Research Foundation field station with all his own equipment (hardhat , carbide lamp, knee crawlers, cave pack), and spent any spare moments underground looking for leads in the Upper Salts breakdown (Hall 1967). Bob supervised test excavations in one of the few places within Upper Salts where there is sufficient sediment to make digging possible (figure 12.2). In addition he collected representative items for the Illinois State Museum: fragments of vegetal-fiber artifacts (cordage, footwear), remnants of bottle gourd and hard-shelled squash containers , cane, and other prehistoric torch materials (figures 12.3, 12.4). Meanwhile, I led small crews in surveying and recording in situ remains in Indian Avenue of Lower Salts. That first field season was sufficiently successful to interest the National Geographic Society Research Com­ mit­ tee, which helped fund the Salts Cave project for several years, as did a couple of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation, but the crucial logistical support aboveground and below came—first, last, and always—from the Cave Research Foundation (CRF). From its 1963 beginnings in Salts Cave (Watson 1969), the CRF Archeological Project expanded to Mam­ moth Cave in 1969 and to Lee Cave (in Mammoth Cave National Park) in the early 1970s (Freeman et al. 1973). In 1976, Ron Wilson (paleontologist and archaeozoologist ), Louise Robbins (physical anthropologist), and I began work at Jaguar Cave, Tennessee (Robbins, Wilson, and Watson 1981; Watson et al. 2005; Willey, Stolen, et al. 2005; Willey, Watson, et al. 2009). A year later, National Speleological Society (NSS) cavers exploring another Tennessee cave (now known as 3rd Unnamed Cave) told us about archaeological remains they had found there, and we undertook some preliminary documentation in 1977 and 1981 (Franklin 2008). Back in Mammoth Cave National Park, still during the 1970s, one of my Washington University graduate students , Ken Carstens, initiated a dissertation project surveying rockshelters and open sites to build a chronology of the park’s prehistory, and to provide context for the dark-zone Forty Years’ Pursuit of Human Prehistory in the World Underground Patty Jo Watson Patty Jo Watson 186 caves that were dozens of miles long. Approximately 15–20 miles of Mammoth and Salts Caves were known to prehistoric people, the total length of the system containing these two and several other connected caves now being in excess of 390 mapped miles and still going. In 1980, however, Patrick and Cheryl Munson began archaeological research in another big midcontinental cave, Wyandotte (5.2 miles long), in southern Indiana (Munson and Munson 1990). A second significant breakthrough also came in 1980 when University of Tennessee archaeologist Charles Faulkner was told about a cave in central Tennessee (soon named Mud Glyph) that had unusual markings on the sediment-coated passage walls (Faulkner 1986, 2008). By 1986, there was sufficient work in subterranean locales of the Eastern Woodlands to enable a half-day session at the Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA) 51st Annual Meeting in New Orleans (Session 75, April 27). The sescave archaeology (Carstens 1980). This was quite important , and something I had ignored for far too long. Also in the 1970s, another Washington University grad student— Bill Marquardt—and I began a long-term effort (the Shell Mound Archaeological Project, SMAP) in the Big Bend of Green River, 40 miles downstream of Mammoth Cave National Park (Marquardt and Watson 2005). My involvement in SMAP grew out of the work by Dick Yarnell on plant remains from Salts Cave, including those he retrieved from a series of ancient human fecal deposits (Yarnell 1969, 1974a, 1974b). During the period of the 1960s and 1970s, the CRF Archeological Project was unique in Eastern North American archaeology. No one else was persistently investigatingprehistorichumanactivitiesfarintothedarkzonesof Figure 12.1...

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