1 Early Kentucky

Early Indians in Kentucky (12,000 B.C.-1650 A.D.)

For many years writers depicted Kentucky, the Great Meadows of Indian lore, as uninhabited prior to European settlement. They believed that the Indians considered the land sacred and lived elsewhere, coming to the region only to hunt and war. However, almost three thousand years before Kentucky pioneers came face to face with such tribes as the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Chickasaw, the area had been inhabited by prehistoric Indians. The ancestors of these earliest Kentuckians may have come to the Western Hemisphere as early as 20,000 years ago by crossing a strip of land, now submerged beneath the Bering Straits, that connected the Asian and North American continents. They slowly drifted southward, arriving in Kentucky by 12,000 B.C. Over many years these early Indians developed four prehistoric traditions which archaeologists have designated as Paleo-Indian (12,000-7500 B.C.), Archaic  (7500-1500 B.C.), Woodland (1500 B.C.-900 A.D.), and Mississippian  (900-1650 A.D.)

 A nomadic people, the Paleo-Indians used Clovis points (leaf-shaped projectile points—archeologists prefer the term "projectile point" instead of arrowhead) to hunt big game animals like the mammoth, mastodon, and bison which thrived in the cool, post-glacial environment. While the early hunters did produce stone projectile points, their transient life style kept them from making large quantities of tools and implements. No skeletal remains of Paleo-Indians have been found in Kentucky.

By 7500 B.C. Kentucky's Indian culture changed. Large game animals died out, and the Archaic Indians now depended on fishing and efficient gathering of wild foods as well as hunting. The white-tailed deer and the elk became the dominant game animals. Hunting skills improved with the use of the atlatl, a short wooden board which enabled the Indians to throw their spears farther than with their arms alone. Stone tools, ground to the desired shape, appeared, and artifacts, such as grooved axes, conical and cylindrical pestles, bone awls, and cannel coal beads, have been found. A unique feature of the Archaic period was the "hominy hole"-a particular type of depression worn in sandstone by grinding or pulverizing. Despite its name, the hominy hole was probably used for grinding up nuts or seed; corn (from which hominy is made) was not grown in Kentucky until the Woodland period. Shell (mussel) mound sites along the Green, Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers indicate that the Indians returned to the same place year after year. Archaic Indian social groups were probably small, consisting of a few cooperating families. Their dead were buried with bodies flexed in round pits, and sometimes tools were included in the graves.

Beginning about 1500 B.C. people of the Woodland culture entered Kentucky and occupied the area for about 600 years. Efficient hunters and gatherers, the Woodland Indians also participated in an intricate trade network to obtain such things as copper from Lake Superior, obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, and conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico. They mined both Mammoth Cave and Salts Cave for gypsum and mirabilite, a salty seasoning. The Woodland people cultivated corn, sunflowers, giant ragweeds, and amaranth (pigweed), and they raised squash and gourds for containers rather than as a food source. The Woodland Indians buried their dead in conical and later flat and oval shaped burial mounds, which were often ten to twenty feet in height; this practice resulted in their being called the Mound Builders by 19th century observers. The remains of two distinct Woodland groups, the Adena (early Woodland) and the Hopewell (middle Woodland), have been found in north central Kentucky.

The last of the prehistoric people, who lived in Kentucky from  900 A.D.-1650 A.D., were the Mississippian Indians of western Ken
tucky. In the greater Mississippi Valley, these Indians had a well established social order and a full agricultural economy with corn,  beans, squash, and tobacco as the principal crops. They hunted with bow and arrow, made pottery in effigy forms, and fashioned large, chipped stone knives, picks and hoes. These Indians constructed permanent homes of woven branches and plastered mud and protected their villages with wooden palisades (walls made of tall posts) and a moat (wide ditch) outside the palisades. These features gave the villages much the same appearance as the early pioneer forts. Although the Mississippians buried their dead in small burial mounds or stone box graves, they build large flat-topped temple mounds as the ceremonial centers of their cities. Because of this construction design, they have been called the Temple-Mound Builders.

Some, but not all, archeologists recognize a fifth Kentucky Indian tradition, the Fort Ancient culture, which developed when the Mississippian tradition came into contact with the retrogressive culture of the indigenous people of northern Kentucky. These Indians lived among the Hopewell sites but had no part in building the great mounds of the earlier period. Kentucky's Fort Ancient people differed little from Woodland Indians in that they continued the old way of life of hunting small game and gathering food. They also planted beans, corn, and squash to supplement their diets and they built villages of a few dozen bark-covered huts, generally on prominent knolls, but their settlements contained no temple mounds. They buried their dead in small burial mounds or stone box graves, made pottery for food and water storage, and carved small gorgets (throat armor) incised with human faces.

Extant records neither reveal what happened to the Mississippian way of life nor how long before the arrival of the white pioneer that Kentucky was without Indian inhabitants other than roaming bands of hunters and warriors. Probably a century elapsed, and undoubtedly many a battle was fought on Kentucky soil during the interval. Neither the southern Indians (the Cherokees and Chickasaws) nor the Shawnees from north of the Ohio River were strong enough to occupy and permanently hold the Great Meadows. However, the Shawnees seem to have made the greatest effort to live in Kentucky. In the early 18th century there had been a Shawnee settlement in Clark County called Eskippakithika, and there were others in Greenup and Johnson counties. But for unknown reasons, perhaps a massive crop failure or widespread disease, most of the Indians who had lived in Kentucky disappeared before Europeans arrived in the state.