“Stone Box Graves” is not the name of a Late Sixties rock band out of San Francisco, or a new group playing in Nashville’s Tin Pan South entertainment district. Over a thousand years ago, the people of the Cumberland River Valley buried their dead in crypts with walls and lids made of stone slabs.
Kallimako, the original name of the Tennessee River, was a Maya word. Prosperous Maya families in Central America also buried their deceased in stone box graves. Is there a connection?
NASHVILLE, TN – Beneath the soil of the Music City remains vestiges of a mystery that had never been fully solved. As soon as the first settlers a Fort Nashborough on the Cumberland River began digging wells and plowing fields in the 1780s, they found shards of ceramics, plus finely crafted art of stone and copper that seemed too sophisticated to have been made by the angry American Indians, who were contesting the presence of Europeans on their ancestral lands.
Once the threat of attacks was removed in 1793, many more settlers arrived in the region. Along the edges of the Cumberland River, farmers clearing fields discovered numerous cemeteries with flagstone sided crypts and also earthen mounds. In search of treasure, they dug into the mounds, finding no gold, but many burials. Inside the stone crypts that became known as “stone box graves,” were intact statues and pottery. The settlers continued to assume that indigenous savages were intellectually incapable of such sophisticated art. Stories began spreading across the young United States that an ancient European civilization had been discovered on the Cumberland River around Nashville.
Some of the stone box grave cemeteries were extremely large. The Noel Native American cemetery near Granny White Pike and Clifton Lane in Nashville is thought by archaeologists to contain over 3,000 stone box burials. A cemetery of this scale would have probably been associated with a large Native American town. However, the town’s location is currently not known for certain.
Middle Tennessee’s ancient earthworks and town sites were particularly attractive locations to promote Eurasian origins for North American indigenous architecture. Southeastern Tennessee was still occupied by the ancestors of the Creek Indians when the first French and English explorers reached the region in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Many of that region’s hundreds of mounds were located in or near towns then occupied by the Apike, Kusa or Koasati branches of the Creeks. The Creeks were known mound builders. However, the Cumberland River Valley was primarily occupied by the Shawnee and Chickasaw Indians until the late 1700s. The mound and town sites appeared to have been abandoned for centuries and neither ethnic group was associated with the construction of large mounds.
Imaginative writers of the early 1800s assigned a wide range of explanations for these stone box graves. Underlying these essays and books was a desire to justify the seizure of Native American lands on the premise that the savages had massacred the aboriginal owners of the land, who were from the Old World. The most popular Stone Box Grave builders were the Celts. Many of Nashville’s earliest settlers were of either Scottish, Irish or Welsh heritage. In their logic, the new Celtic settlers were merely occupying what was rightfully theirs.
Others subscribed to the theory that the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel built the Stone Box Graves and mounds, but were massacred by savage Indians. This interpretation of Indian mounds is found in the Book of Mormon. Throughout the 1800s other ethnicities such as the Romans, Greeks, Atlantans, Egyptians, Sumerians or Vikings built these structures. Among the populace, “anybody but the red savages” was their common interpretation.
Nashville antiquarian champions a Native American origin
General Gates P. Thruston was a stereotypical Victorian Era scholar. His colonial roots were in Virginia, but he was born in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from Miami University and, on the eve of the Civil War, received a Bachelor of Law from the University of Cincinnati. Later in life, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Miami University.
Thruston was also a decorated officer in the Union Army, who fought in many battles in Tennessee and Georgia. At the close of the Civil War, he was appointed military commander of Union occupation forces in Nashville. He soon married a Nashville gal, then elected to plant his roots in the Volunteer State. At the end of Reconstruction, Thruston was appointed president of the State Insurance Company then channeled those earnings into many profitable real estate investments.
Nashville was booming. By the early 1880s Thruston had accumulated so much wealth that he could devote most of his time to civic duties. He was one of the city’s leaders who invited evangelist Sam Jones from Cartersville, GA to preach revivals in Nashville. These revivals led to the construction of the Ryman-Jones Tabernacle, later known as the Grand Ole Opry.
The primary interest of Thruston was ancient artifacts, particularly those found around Nashville. His curiosity had begun during the Civil War when many sophisticated artifacts had been unearthed by Union engineers during construction of fortifications. From those early discoveries, Thruston developed one of Tennessee’s largest artifact collections, which was later given to Vanderbilt University. Throughout out his life, Thruston associated with academicians and scholarly societies. He often was addressed by the title of “Professor” because of his frequent lectures at Vanderbilt and other universities.
Thruston became increasingly convinced in the 1870s that the Nashville Area was the location of an ancient Native American civilization that had disappeared prior to the arrival of Anglo-European settlers. His friendship with Cyrus Thomas and General William Powell of the Smithsonian Institute resulted in numerous archeological excavations by the Smithsonian during the 1880s. Smithsonian archaeologists and forensic biologists proved that the towns, mounds and stone box graves in Middle Tennessee were built by people indigenous to the Americas. Their skeletons were not of either Celts or ancient Israelites.
An exception is one grave at the base of an approximately 1,800 year old mound on Bat Creek near Cleveland, TN. It contained what appeared to be brass bracelets and a stone tablet that seemed to be written in a style of Aramaic writing used in Judea in the Second Century. This tablet, known as the Bat Creek Stone, remains controversial. It may be fraudulent or it may be authentic.
In 1897, Thruston published the landmark book, “The Antiquities of Tennessee and the State of Aboriginal Society in the Scale of Civilization Represented by Them.” The public was astounded by the ceramic statuary and pottery in Thurston’s collection. Thruston hired surveyors to document the Native American town sites in the Nashville area. Many of these sites have now been intentionally destroyed or covered with buildings.
In the book’s conclusion, Thruston, did not assign an ethnic identity to his proposed “Cumberland Valley Civilization,” other than a speculation that an advanced society of Native America mound builders first appeared around 900 AD then collapsed quickly after the arrival of the Spanish. His assessment was remarkably accurate. Radiocarbon dating techniques were not invented until the late 1940s.
The mystery continues
In 1915 archaeologists of the Heye Foundation excavated the famous Nacoochee Mound in the Nacoochee Valley of northeastern Georgia near the present day alpine resort of Helen. The earliest maps of the Nacoochee Valley label the area around this mound as the Creek Indian village of Itsate. Itsate is also a name that the Itsa Mayas of Central America called themselves. The Nacoochee Valley is located southeast of Brasstown Bald Mountain. A complex of stone masonry terraces, buildings, altars and cairns have been discovered on the west side of Brasstown Bald that were originally built about 1,100 years ago. The original construction of the Nacoochee Mound also dates from this period. See http://www.examiner.com/architecture-design-in-national/mayas-the-usa-controversy-you-be-the-juror
The archaeology profession’s skills had made great advances since the 1880s. More detailed information was discerned from their work in the Nacoochee Valley that was possible during Thruston’s lifetime. The archaeologists were surprised to find a cluster of stone box graves at the base of the mound that were identical in construction to those 200 miles (321 km) away in the Nashville, TN area. The artifacts unearthed in the lowest levels of the mound were very similar to those found in Middle Tennessee. These discoveries suggested that the “civilization” in the Nashville area was far more widespread than originally thought.
There were some important differences between the Nacoochee Mound and the cemeteries in the Nashville Area. The Nacoochee Mound contained stone box graves of both adults and children. Tennessee stone box graves usually only contain adults. The Heye Foundation archaeologists also noticed that the mound apparently was built OVER a Stone Box Grave Culture cemetery. The stone box graves extend beyond the mound’s footprint, and were all originally at ground level. Burials in newer areas of the Nacoochee Mound are not encased with stone slabs, and contained artifacts associated with the ancestors of the Creek Indians. This suggests that the Stone Box Grave people did not build the large mounds in the Southeast, as Gates Thruston speculated.
Since 1915 stone box graves have also been found in other areas of the Southern Highlands, the Ohio Valley and the middle Mississippi River Valley. Archaeological references generally associate the stone box graves with the Mississippian (or Southeastern) Ceremonial Culture. The Yuchi Indians of the Southeast and Oklahoma in recent years have theorized that their ancestors constructed the stone box graves. However, as yet there have not been any DNA studies of human remains found inside the stone box graves. Without DNA analysis, it is almost impossible to assign 1000 year old skeletons to modern Native American tribes.
While the anthropology profession is in general agreement with General Thruston that Native Americans built the stone box cemeteries in the Nashville Area, there is little consensus on where these people came from and where they went, when the town sites were abandoned. Some academicians theorize that almost the entire population around Nashville was wiped out by a plague or perhaps invaders. Others theorize that the builders of Middle Tennessee’s stone box graves merely moved somewhere else. Perhaps they were the ancestors of the Yuchi or Chickasaw Indians.
A possible Maya connection?
The earliest maps of the future state of Tennessee in the late 1600s and early 1700s often label the Tennessee River as the Callimaco River. Inexplicably, Tennessee’s scholars have never tried to translate the name. The phonetic version of the river’s original name, Kalli-mako, literally means House of the King according to an Itza Maya dictionary published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The Tennessee River does not flow through Nashville, but does pass Knoxville and Chattanooga, TN.
Prosperous Maya merchants and commoners often buried their loved ones in stone box graves near their houses. Like the inhabitants of the Nacoochee Valley in Georgia, and unlike Nashville, the Itza buried children and adults in stone box graves.
Less affluent Maya commoners utilized domesticated King Vultures to eat away the flesh of their deceased then buried their skeletons under the floors of houses. Until the 1700s, several Indian tribes of the Southeastern United States followed the same custom. The King or Painted Vulture has been extinct in the Southeast since the late 1700s. The wild Painted Vultures were dependent on the flesh of animals killed in intentional fires set by Native Americans.
Because the Nashville area seems to be the heart of the region, where the Stone Box Grave Culture was concentrated, it is also the location were the riddle of the Stone Box Grave Culture is likely to be solved. A Music City version of the Rosetta stone may appear someday on a creek bank or at a construction site. The understanding of the past has been changed many times in the past by a chance discovery at an unanticipated location.
Where to see Stone Box Grave Culture artifacts
Many of the artifacts that Thruston P. Gates donated to Vanderbilt University are now on the display at the Tennessee State Museum in Downtown Nashville. It is located in the lower level of the James K. Polk Cultural Center at 505 Deaderick Street. The telephone number is 800-407-4324. Admission is free. Public hours at the museum are Tuesday through Saturday (10 AM – 5 PM) and Sundays (1 PM – 5 PM)
Some artifacts from the Nacoochee Mound may be seen at George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian at One Bowling Green Way in Manhattan, New York City. Its telephone number is 412-514-3700. This branch of the Smithsonian Institute is open 10 AM to 5 PM daily, and to 8 PM on Thursday evenings.
The Nacoochee Mound may be viewed from U. S. Highway 76, south of Helen, GA. Even though Georgia’s Nacoochee Valley is a very important archaeological zone, there is no archaeological museum within this valley. In the vicinity of nearby Brasstown Bald Mountain is a small museum created by the U. S. Forest Service and a state funded exhibit of artifacts at the Brasstown Resort, which is not open to the general public. Both museums mislabeled prehistoric artifacts as being Cherokee in origin. The Cherokees were using muskets and cooking in iron pots, when they arrived in the region.
Comments