Although Chota and Tanasi had distinct political, social, and demographic traits, research excavators in the late 1960s determined that the two towns are archaeologically indistinguishable.

Tanasi first appears in the historical record in the early 18th century, at a time when the fur trade between the English and the Cherokee had grown to the extent that the colonists wanted to regulate it.

Ethnologist James Mooney reported that the meaning of the town's name is unknown, but noted that it was used for other places among Cherokee lands in Tennessee and North Carolina.

[9] In 1725, the province of South Carolina dispatched Colonel George Chicken to Tanasi to obtain Cherokee assistance in the colony's struggles with the Creek.

Not only was Cherokee society highly decentralized and the towns generally exercised considerable autonomy under their own chiefs, but travel between these territories was difficult in the mountainous region.)

As evidence of his success, Cuming sought an esteemed symbolic headdress known as the Crown of Tanasi— described as resembling a wig made of dyed possum hair— which he hoped to present to the king of England.

Cuming departed for England shortly thereafter, taking with him a party that included Eleazar Wiggan, future Cherokee leader Attakullakulla, and two Tanasi warriors named Clogoittah and Oukanaekah to present to the king.

[13] In 1775, the Tanasi Warrior was among the chiefs who signed a treaty with the Watauga Association of Carolina colonists, who wanted to create an independent jurisdiction west of the mountains, in what became Tennessee.

Some have speculated that the two towns were a single community with two districts and two governments, not unlike the situation that reportedly existed in Great Tellico and Chatuga around the same time.

Archeological excavators in the early 1970s noted virtually no differences in the types of cultural materials and features uncovered at the two village sites, which had developed on either side of a creek.

[16] Cyrus Thomas, working for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology in the late 1880s, conducted a mound survey at the Chota-Tanasi site.

In 1939, Thomas Lewis and Madeline Kneburg directed an excavation at the Chota-Tanasi site with funding by the Works Progress Administration to pay for laborers.

Lewis and Kneburg, who were searching for cultural data with which to compare their earlier finds at Hiwassee Island, uncovered 22 burials, 85 pit features, 982 postmolds, and one structure.

Investigators hoped to identify the locations of each town and to find evidence that might define the Cherokee peoples' relationship to those occupying the area in the South Appalachian Mississippian culture-era (c. 1000–1600 A.D.).