Common materials used for construction of the graves were limestone and shale, both varieties of stone which naturally break into slab-like shapes.
The practice was especially prominent in the Cumberland River Valley of Kentucky and Tennessee; thousands of such graves have been found during excavations in the Nashville area.
[14] Since the beginning of archaeological investigations in the region in the late nineteenth century, the graves have been a source of interpreting the prehistoric inhabitants of the area.
Joseph Jones, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, investigated the Middle Tennessee area in the late 19th century.
In the 1870s Frederick Ward Putnam of the Peabody Museum also excavated several large platform mounds with stone box graves in the vicinity of Nashville.
Gates P. Thrustons 1890 manuscript, which started as a piece on a stone box grave cemetery found in Nashville, was the first comprehensive analysis of artifacts for the state of Tennessee.
Thruston's conclusions about the builders of the local mounds and box graves added to the 19th-century myth of the "Moundbuilders", who were believed to be distinct from Native Americans.