Of Caves and Shell Mounds

2. Toward Building a Culture History of the Mammoth Cave Area

2 Toward Building a Culture History of the Mammoth Cave Area Kenneth C. Carstens THE CENTRAL KENTUCKY Karst is located primarily in south-central Kentucky's Mississippian Plateau physiographic region. This is an area consisting of deeply bedded limestones and associated karst (including cave) features. The region extends north into Indiana, south into Tennessee, and west to the Kentucky portion of the Cumberland River; it lies south of the western coal field region (Quinlan 1970). Within the north-central area of the Central Kentucky Karst is Mammoth Cave National Park, a region of about 21,J42 ha. The region has long been known primarily for containing the world's longest cave system, but for several decades the professional archaeological community has also been aware of important prehistoric organic materials in the Central Kentucky Karst (Carstens 1980; Watson 1966; Watson, ed., 1974; Watson and Carstens 1975, 1982; Watson et al. 1969). Between 1973 and 1975 I conducted archaeological investigations in and around Mammoth Cave National Park to locate a temporal sequence of rockshelter/cave vestibule sites collectively spanning the prehistoric culture history of that archaeological region. My work (Carstens 1974, 1975a, b, 1976, 1980; Watson and Carstens 1982), now supplemented and complemented by Prentice (1987b, 1988, 1989, 1994), was important because it was the first since Nels C. Nelson (1917,1923) to provide information about prehistoric economies giving rise to Archaic and Woodland horticultural activities in this karstic region. Among earlier accounts of the prehistory of the Mammoth Cave area are writings by Rafinesque (1824) and various reports of "mummified" (actually desiccated) Indians (Meloy 1971) from several surrounding caves. Rafinesque's 1824 entry "shellmounds along Green River and mummies in caves" both highlighted and foretold of future archaeological studies for the region. The first detailed reporting of cultural resources from the Mammoth Cave area were foreshadowed by Col. Bennett Young (1910), who wrote what might best be described as a "guide" to the antiquities of Kentucky. But it was the massive collections of organic and inorganic prehistoric artifacts obtained from Salts Cave by F. W. Putnam for the Peabody Museum and materials donated to the American Museum of Natural History by John Nelson, Mammoth Cave guide, that brought about the first systematic archaeological study of the Mammoth Cave region by Nels C. Nelson between 1916 and 1923. 5 6 I Kenneth C. Carstens Nels C. Nelson was the first person to conduct and report results of archaeological surface studies and excavations in the Mammoth Cave area (1917, 1923). Known primarily for his excavations in the Vestibule of Mammoth Cave, Nelson obtained additional collections for the American Museum of Natural History by conducting surface reconnaissance and excavations throughout the area of present-day Mammoth Cave National Park. Unfortunately, Nelson's work was largely ignored by fellow archaeologists. Even the additional discovery of another "mummy" in 1935 (Meloy 1971; Pond 1935, 1937) added but short-lived interest to the significant archaeological potential of the Mammoth Cave area. In retrospect, it might have been disinterest in the cave archaeology of the Mammoth Cave region that contributed to preserving some sites throughout the area. Archaeological methods of the 19205 to 1950S often included total site excavation. During the late 1950S and early 1960s Douglas W. Schwartz conducted a series of studies in Mammoth Cave National Park and vicinity for the federal government (Schwartz 1958a-h, 1960a, b, 1965, 1967; Schwartz and Hanson 1961; Schwartz and Sloan 1958, 1960a, b; Schwartz, Sloan, and Hanson 1960). Schwartz inventoried previously reported sites (Le., C. Moore 1916; Nelson 1917; Funkhouser and Webb 1928; Young 1910), surveyed portions of major trunk passages within Mammoth Cave for archaeological materials, reported previously unrecorded sites, and test-excavated several sites located in the Nolin and Rough River areas north of the park. In spite of the aforementioned work, no chronicle of the culture history for the park region had been developed prior to Watson's work in the late 1960s (Watson, ed., 1974; Watson et al. 1969). According to Watson (ed. 1974), her work during the early 1970S in the Mammoth Cave area had two major purposes. She wished to describe systematically and to explain the aboriginal utilization of the cave system and to document the prehistoric diet of the Late Archaic and Early Woodland cave explorers as preserved within human paleofecal specimens from that cave system (Watson, ed., 1974:XV). It was Watson's intent to gather data bearing on the development of horticulture that would help answer important questions anthropologists ask...