Tuckaleechee Cove: A Passage through Time by Boyce N. Driskell and Robert J. Norrell (review)

Tuckaleechee Cove is one of several small valleys in East Tennessee adjacent to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In 1999 the Tennessee Department of Transportation began a project to widen the narrow road through the cove to accommodate an increasing number of visitors. The project came to a halt, however, when early surveys revealed an extensive number of important archaeological artifacts. This discovery eventually brought together more than a half dozen state and federal agencies, as well as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Chickasaw Nation, to craft a memorandum of agreement that specified how the project should proceed. The agreement also stipulated that the resulting archaeological reports should be compiled and prepared so as to be accessible to the general public. The result is Tuckaleechee Cove: A Passage through Time, an informative and highly readable book. In addition to interpreting the archaeology for a general readership, authors Boyce N. Driskell and Robert J. Norrell provide a true “passage through time” that traces the history of the cove and its human occupants from approximately 13,000 years ago until the present.

The “Big Dig” (as the project was informally known) ultimately became one of the largest archaeological projects ever undertaken in Tennessee. Focused on a nearly five-mile-long section of the cove that covered about 175 acres, the dig included more than 250 archaeologists, historians, and other specialists and unearthed more than a million artifacts. Those artifacts that relate to the cove’s earliest inhabitants are discussed in the first two chapters. This section of the book is perhaps the most engaging, since it provides new details for a period of the cove’s past that had been previously undocumented and poorly understood. Through discoveries such as ceramics, projectile points, an extensive system of postholes for a protective palisade, and the complete skeleton of a dog that was apparently interred with some ceremony, the authors present a series of increasingly sophisticated prehistoric societies. These were people who engaged in hunting, fishing, foraging, and agriculture; they respected family and authority, worried about enemies, and participated in a vast trade network that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

The remaining chapters of the book focus on the Cherokee and the Euro-American presence in the cove. The authors point to glass trade beads to illustrate early interaction between Cherokees and European traders. Archaeologists also uncovered tools and items from white settlers who displaced the Cherokees and whose descendants witnessed the Civil War and the booming timber industry that followed. These stories are admittedly more familiar to the general reader, but they gain an exciting new perspective through the meshing of the archaeological and historical records.

This is a brief book, and there is certainly room for a broader study of the cove. Yet Tuckaleechee Cove is very effective in achieving its purpose. With an objective to highlight the differences and subtle similarities of the many cultures who inhabited this small Appalachian cove during a span of 13,000 years, the authors succeed wonderfully.