Extensive archaeological work has provided a clear picture of the town's appearance and activities, particularly the nature of trade, social organization, agriculture, and relationships with other Native American communities.

Well-known British traders William Trent and George Croghan maintained trading posts in the town with large warehouses to store furs, skins, and other goods.

Lower Shawneetown was abandoned in 1758 to avoid colonial American raids during the French and Indian War, and was relocated further up the Scioto River to the Pickaway Plains.

[9] The first reference to the town is found in a letter of 27 July 1734, written by François-Marie Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, describing an English trader's warehouse in "the home of the Shawnees on the Ohio River.

The town also lay near the Seneca Trail, which was used by Cherokees and Catawbas, and the opportunity to trade for furs and to broker political alliances attracted both British and French traders.

[3]: 835 Historian Richard White characterizes Lower Shawneetown and other growing Native American settlements in the region, including Logstown, Pickawillany, Kuskusky, and Kittanning as "Indian republics," multiethnic and autonomous, made up of a variety of smaller disparate social groups: village fragments, extended families, or individuals, often survivors of epidemics and refugees from conflicts with other Native Americans or with Europeans.

[21] According to historian Richard Warren, "It was a sprawling series of wickiups and longhouses... French and British-allied traders regarded Lower Shawneetown as one of two capitals of the Shawnee tribe.

[25][26] According to A. Gwynn Henderson, eighteenth-century homes in this community would have resembled those of the Fort Ancient inhabitants (a Native American culture that occupied the region from about 1000-1750 CE): ...Long rectangular buildings with rounded corners constructed of frameworks of wooden posts set singly into the ground and covered with either thatch, bark, mats or skins.

[13] In a journal entry from February, 1751, Christopher Gist describes the Ohio country in the area of Lower Shawneetown: All the Way from the Shannoah Town...is fine, rich, level, Land, well timbered with large Walnut, Ash, Sugar Trees, Cherry Trees, &c; it is well watered with a great Number of little Streams or Rivulets, and full of beautiful natural Meadows, covered with wild Rye, blue Grass, and Clover, and abounds with Turkeys, Deer, Elks, and most Sorts of Game, particularly Buffaloes, thirty or forty of which are frequently seen feeding in one Meadow...a most delightful Country.

[36][5]: 200  After staying in Lower Shawneetown for a few weeks, they left the town on 24 June and proceeded down the Ohio River, then in August headed south into Kentucky to found the community of Eskippakithiki.

[35][37] The French had focused much attention on Canada, allowing English traders to establish themselves in the Ohio Valley, but in the late 1740s they took notice of Lower Shawneetown's size and commercial dependence on British trade.

In February, 1748, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, French Secretary of State of the Navy (which included the Bureau of the Colonies), wrote that ...it is reported that since the War, [the Shawnees] have been joined by a considerable number of savages of all nations, forming a sort of republic [at Lower Shawnee Town], dominated by some Iroquois of the Five Nations who form part of it; and that, as the English almost entirely supply their needs, it is to be feared that they may succeed in seducing them...I am writing to Monsieur de Vaudreuil regarding that union, so that he may strive to break it.

Céloron decided to send a delegation ahead, made up of Kahnawake and Abenaki Indians led by Philippe-Thomas Chabert de Joncaire (who was raised in a Seneca community), to announce that the French were not intending to attack them.

[22][41]In his description of the meeting between Céloron and the English traders, Bonnecamps says, "The Englishmen...were ordered to withdraw, and promised to do so," although he adds elsewhere, "firmly resolved, doubtless, to do nothing of the kind, as soon as our backs were turned.

[10]: 155 Lower Shawneetown's size and connections to neighboring communities allowed traders to establish storehouses for incoming and outgoing goods, managed by European men who lived in the town year-round and sometimes married Native American women.

The town's location on the Ohio River allowed traders to send furs and skins by canoe up to Logstown, where they were taken by packhorses over the mountains, transferred into wagons for a fourteen-day journey to Philadelphia and then shipped to London.

Father Joseph Bonnecamps examined the furs and described them as the skins of "bears, otters, cats, précans [possibly raccoons], and roe-deer, with the hair retained, for neither martens nor beavers are seen there.

Traders brought guns, metal tools, knives, saddles, hatchets, glass and ceramic beads, strouds (a kind of coarse blanket), ruffled and plain shirts, coats, clay tobacco pipes, brass and iron pots, and rum to trade for the furs and skins of deer, elk, bison, bear, beaver, raccoon, fox, wildcat, muskrat, mink and fisher.

European trade goods found at the site include gun spalls and gunflints, gun parts (sideplate, mainspring, ram pipes, and breech plugs), wire-wound and drawn glass beads, tinkling cones, a button, a brass pendant, an earring, cutlery, kettle ears, a key, nails, chisels, hooks, a buckle, a Jew's harp, and pieces of a pair of iron scissors.

[2][3]: 836–37 [25][27] On 29 June 1752, William Trent had just left Logstown when he learned of the Raid on Pickawillany, a large Native American village that was attacked by French and Ottawa forces and destroyed.

He traveled to Lower Shawneetown, where he met on 3 July in the council-house with Thomas Burney and Andrew McBryer, two English traders who had escaped during the fighting, who gave Trent a full account of the raid.

[44]: 84–86  On 4 August 1752, Trent met with a group of survivors from Pickawillany, including the wife and son of Memeskia, the Piankeshaw chief who had been killed in the raid, and presented them with gifts.

In the 1918 edition of Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, George P. Donehoo, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, records: Shortly after 1753 the village...was destroyed by a flood.

He says a Canoe with Ten French Men in her came up to the Lower Shawonese Town with him, but on some of the English Traders threatening to take them, they set back that night without telling their business.

[51] George Croghan reported that he had lost his storehouses and their contents at Pine Creek, Logstown, Muskingum and the newly built storehouse at Lower Shawneetown that he shared with William Trent and Robert Callender:[26] "One large House on the Ohio, opposite to the mouth of the River Scioto, where the Shawanese had built their new Town, called the Lower Shawanese Town, which House we learn by the Indians is now in the possession of a French Trader."

[60]: 510 An article in the New-York Mercury of 16 February 1756, describing Mary's capture and escape, mentions that while in Lower Shawneetown she saw "a considerable Number of English Prisoners, who have been taken Captives from the Frontiers of Virginia.

[67] In his journal under the date 28 November 1758, Croghan writes: Set off at seven o'clock, in company with six Delawares, and that night arrived at Logs Town, which we found deserted by its late inhabitants.

Community leaders were rarely able to unify a majority in backing policy decisions, which prevented Europeans from establishing firm diplomatic relations with Lower Shawneetown as they did (to some extent) at Logstown.

[70] The third mural shows Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville meeting with Native American residents of Lower Shawneetown and a few British traders during his visit on 25 August 1749.

Sites on both sides of the Ohio River were excavated again between 1984 and 1987 and all have produced Late Fort Ancient Montour Phase (1550 to 1750) artifacts, including mid-18th century Euro-American trade goods and human and animal remains.