Native Americans were using the site as a semi-permanent hunting camp as early as 7500 BC, making it one of the oldest-known habitation areas in Tennessee.

Analysis of the site's Woodland period (1000 BC - 1000 AD) artifacts shows evidence of an extensive trade network that reached to indigenous peoples in Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio.

The Overhill village of Tuskegee, which is best known as the birthplace of the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah, was located northwest of the Icehouse Bottom site.

In 1819, the Cherokee sold the Overhill territory south of the Little Tennessee River, which included all of what is now Monroe County, to the United States government.

Shortly thereafter, an early settler known as "Pioneer" John McGhee purchased several thousand acres along the Little Tennessee River, including the Icehouse Bottom site.

[2] Carson's family owned the land when the Tennessee Valley Authority began buying property along the river for the creation of the Tellico Reservoir.

[3] Although it is unclear how Icehouse Bottom got its name, historian Carson Brewer wrote of a McGhee family story that recalled an "ice-house" located in the 19th century on their lands in the Little Tennessee Valley.

That same year, the University of Tennessee Department of Anthropology, under contract with the National Park Service, began a survey of the valley to determine its archaeological resources and to select sites for excavation prior to inundation.

[11] The early inhabitants of Icehouse Bottom had a diet primarily of white-tailed deer, black bear, acorns, and hickory nuts.

The Woodland period materials also include non-local pottery sherds, attesting to the people being part of a large trading network.

Sherds confirm a trade network that included not only the Hopewell centers, but also the Sylva and Garden Creek areas of North Carolina, the McMahan Indian Mounds a few miles to the east in what is now Sevierville, and sites as far away as Georgia.