ABSTRACT

The shell mounds along the Green River in Butler, McLean, Muhlenberg, and Ohio counties, western Kentucky, have long been known to archaeologists as a result of early work by C. B. Moore (1916) and extensive excavations by Works Progress Administration (WPA) archaeologists (Webb 1946, 1950a, 1950b; Webb and Haag 1939, 1940, 1947) in the late 1930s and early 1940s. We became interested in these sites in 1971, wishing to compare the subsistence patterns of their inhabitants with those known for the prehistoric cave miners of Salts (Watson et al. 1969) and Mammoth (Watson 1974) caves. We developed new equipment, strategies, and techniques to investigate the shell middens and we have been able to contribute to advances in our collective knowledge of horticultural origins in the eastern woodlands (Chomko and Crawford 1978; Crawford 1982; Marquardt and Watson 1983; Wagner 1979). The surprising complexity of the shell middens' stratification convinced us that a broader and, at the same time, more intensive study of shell midden formation processes was necessary, and this activity has occupied the bulk of our research efforts over the past few years (Gorski 1981, Marquardt and Watson 1983; May 1982; Stein 1980, 1982; Wagner 1983). As our analyses of paleoenvironment, subsistence, and midden formation processes approach completion, we are beginning to look toward larger scale questions such as local and regional settlement patterns and the role of the shell mound populations in long-distance trade and information networks. In this chapter we summarize our findings and suggest some directions for further research.