Hiwassee Island
A Mississippian culture village was inhabited by people of the Hiwassee Island and Dallas phases beginning in the 11th century.
[4][5] The village was led by Chief John Jolly, and Sam Houston lived there for three years.
[10] The Cherokee, who were centered in the highlands of North and South Carolina into the 17th century, expanded into Tennessee during or after whites settled in the area.
[12] Deerskins were traded by the Cherokee for manufactured goods, like garden tools, paint, clothing, beads, ornaments, and rum.
[13] In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, shell gorget styles and burial pits were made on Hiwassee Island.
[16] They cultivated corn and assimilated ways of Anglo-Europeans, such as establishing a constitution and treaties, as well as printing a newspaper called the Phoenix.
[17] The Cherokee had developed a loose sociopolitical "tribal state", where earlier settlements of the late prehistoric (before 1550) and early historic periods (from 1550) had a more autonomous village-ceremonial-center groupings.
[18] The Overhill towns were located in Ridge and Valley area of southeastern Tennessee, northwestern Georgia, and northeastern Alabama.
[20] Hiwassee Complicated Stamped pottery, a common material tradition of the Cherokee with a long history in the Georgia piedmont region, suggests that the "Cherokee culture was the end product of a long, continuous, and multilinear development in the south Appalachian region.
[22] The difference is that the pottery from Hiwassee Island is tempered with finely to medium ground shell instead of sand or grit.
[16] The Cherokee Removal Memorial Park, overlooking Hiwassee Island, was established to honor the relationship between Houston and Native Americans who lived in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
[6] There were four phases of habitation by the Hiwassee Island culture, with 30 rectangular buildings, mostly built of wall trenches or small-pole single-post construction.
[26] Lewis and Kneberg state that the population of the village increased in the latter part of the Dallas phase when a group moved up the Tennessee River.
[27] Later in the Dallas phase, only buildings on the top of summits were built with small posts set in trenches.
[28] One hundred eighty eight people were buried near the Dallas culture houses in rectangular pits.
Buried with them were stone and bone tools, pottery, shell beads, cups and gorgets.
They made Late Mississippian Dallas Decorated and Modeled pottery[27] with new designs, like effigy motifs and incising.
[6] Five burial mounds of 173 bodies and the presence of river-mussel shells are attributed to the Late Woodland period habitations.
[26] Madeline D. Kneberg, a physical anthropologist, was supervisor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville main laboratory.
[2] In 2016, a geophysical survey conduction by the TVA identified up to seven palisade features from the Mississippian village.
Data from this and other studies were used to determine that the site is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
[3] Artifacts are held at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
[2] The island is owned by the United States government, under the stewardship of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
[25] It is a sanctuary for sandhill cranes,[16] which are very tall white birds with black tips on their wings.
[17] The TWRA planted corn on Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge, which is close to the island, to attract Canada geese for hunting.
They stopped planting corn, and the island remains a stopover for up to 5,000 cranes as they fly south for the winter.
[17] Large white pelicans have often stopped over on their spring voyages to Yellowstone National Park and their southern trips to the Gulf Coast.
