Indianz.Com > News > People’s World: Native community stands up to big developers
Indigenous community confronts development to prevent erasure of Nashville’s ancient history
Thursday, March 10, 2022
People's World
NASHVILLE, Tennessee — For several months beginning in the fall, the Native community and its allies have been conducting a campaign to slow down the urban development of the East Bank of the Cumberland River that flows through Nashville. The East Bank is being slated for development by the Oracle Corporation and its associated businesses.
The East Bank and all of downtown Nashville sit atop the remains of a vast, ancient Native American city that flourished here several centuries ago. Indeed, this ancient metropolis had an estimated population of 400,000 in the 14th century. This was during what is called the Mississippian Period of Native American history, which covered the present-day Eastern, Southeastern, and Midwestern United States. Taking into account the surrounding suburbs of towns, villages, hamlets, and farmsteads, the total population of Middle Tennessee was thought to be over one million, making for the largest Indigenous population in all the Southeast.
At this time in history, the ancient metropolis and its suburbs had a population larger than that of Paris, France, at 500,000, London, England, at 200,000, or the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan at 200,000. By the 15th century, the populations of ancient Nashville and its surrounding areas had mysteriously disappeared. The huge populations were astonishingly absent.
The discovery of the ancient city
The discovery of the ancient metropolis came to light when excavation was being done for the construction of the Sounds Baseball Stadium at the old Sulphur Dell baseball park site in 2014. Efforts by the Indigenous community and the historic preservation community, represented by the American Indian Coalition (AIC) and the Tennessee Ancient Sites Conservancy (TASC) respectively, fostered an archaeological excavation for the new Sounds stadium that brought to the surface evidence of a huge Native American metropolis that 900 years ago stood where downtown Nashville now sits.
Remains of this ancient Native American Indigenous city lie layers beneath the pavement and buildings of modern-day Nashville. From downtown Nashville and directly to the east across the Cumberland River once stood a flourishing, bustling city with tens of thousands of inhabitants. This huge metropolis was the center of a brilliant Indigenous civilization that blossomed in the area between 800 to 1500 CE (Common Era). This era also included the earthworks cities of Cahokia in Illinois, Moundville in Alabama, and Spiro in Oklahoma, to cite a few of the known ancient urban centers.
Ancient Nashville was the center of a huge salt making industry, as indicated by the very large pottery vessels uncovered called contemporarily “salt pans.” The manufacture of salt was so prodigious that the mineral was traded as a commodity throughout the entire Southeast.
The ancient city and its environs also abounded in its production of eating implements, particularly spoons and forks, at a time when most of the rest of the world was still eating with its fingers. In fact, the first known “spork,” a combination spoon and fork, in human history originated in the Cumberland Valley, antedating all other such implements made for table use.
The ancient metropole is locally called “Salttown” and the “Buried City.” Currently, the archaeological sites are in jeopardy from the onslaught of development.
When the first European settlers arrived in Middle Tennessee in 1779, they were amazed at the many huge mounds that abounded in the area. There were over 80 such earthworks in the Nashville area alone. There were temple mounds, burial mounds, and mounds for the residences of the leadership of the vast Indigenous complex of ancient cities, towns, villages, hamlets, and farmsteads. Most of the mounds of Davidson County, which encompasses modern Nashville, have fallen prey to the housing, entertainment, and industrial development of a latter-day 20th-century urban boom. Also, mention must be made of the destruction wrought in 2016 by the sly and rapid construction of the Top Golf entertainment complex on the East Bank. Top Golf sits squarely on top of several Mississippian mounds. This development “slipped through the cracks” so to speak, as those who would have organized opposition to the construction were that year covering the resistance at the Standing Rock Reservation to the DAPL pipeline. Ancient Nashville was also the regional hub of major Indigenous trading activity. As a contemporary of the ancient metropolis sat another city, now the Mound Bottom State Archaeological Area, just west of Nashville, which was the site of the region’s earliest shopping mall. Stalls of merchandise stretched for 500 feet, complete with ceramics, jewelry, meat, corn, beans, squash, shellfish, weapons, and tools for barter. Mound Bottom is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There were thousands of burials on both sides of the Cumberland River attesting to the vast size of the ancient population. The burials were enclosed in stone box coffins, a cultural practice seen nowhere else in the Americas. The coffins were made of slabs of limestone. Many of these stone box graves have been looted for prized artifacts but many undoubtedly remain under the proposed development sites slated for the East Bank. Nashville has been home to Native Americans for 14,000-plus years, and the remains of cultures that predate the cities of the Mississippian Period also lie beneath the East Bank.Signed. We are thrilled that @oracle can officially start making a billion-dollar investment in Nashville.
— John Cooper (@JohnCooper4Nash) May 5, 2021
No new debt is being issued, and there is no burden on our taxpayers. pic.twitter.com/wgv13sXwYA
The announcement of Oracle’s billion-dollar investment in Nashville is a huge win for our city. @Oracle will bring 8,500 new jobs with an average salary of $100,000. We secured this agreement without spending taxpayer money or issuing any new debt. pic.twitter.com/TWUOjtAuFr
— Mayor John Cooper (@JohnCooper4Nash) September 30, 2021
Present-day struggle to recognize and preserve Indigenous history
Fast forward to the present and looming on the horizon are the plans of huge corporations to build multi-million-dollar mixed-use projects on the East Bank of the Cumberland.
The American Indian Coalition and the Tennessee Ancient Sites Conservancy have engaged in a number of news interviews, press conferences, meetings with the mayor’s office, and demonstrations in an effort to have appropriate archaeological excavations done of the area before any construction begins or in conjunction with any construction. The Oracle Corporation has cooperated in hiring an archaeological firm to conduct research.
Less responsive has been the Jigsaw public relations firm, which represents MRP Realty. MRP Realty has been the only company moving earth on a daily basis on the East Bank. It can only be surmised that with every movement of earth, Native history is being erased. The realty company has no office in the Nashville area but does have offices in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Contact made with Jigsaw elicited an agreement for a meeting scheduled for December 16, 2021. But at the last minute, the day before the meeting, Jigsaw spokesperson Emily Jackson called off the meeting, citing as an excuse that the Jigsaw representative, Sam Reed, who worked with MRP Realty, was suddenly required to be out of town for the holidays.
Ms. Jackson said that she would be rescheduling a meeting for the first week of January and would send an email later that day with a new meeting date. Nothing was received that day or in the days afterward. With no communication from Jigsaw, the AIC and TASC held a protest demonstration at the Jigsaw office on Tuesday, December 21, and much to the comical surprise of the demonstrators, the office had been closed for the entire day, no doubt because of the demonstration.
In fact, the Jigsaw staff left in such a hurry that they neglected to advise a pest control specialist that the office would be closed. The specialist arrived by appointment and was soundly surprised to find the office was closed. This only added to the comedy of the situation. Some demonstrators remarked, “The settlers are on the run.”
But on the serious side, the struggle continues, with plans already underway for further meetings and demonstrations to stop the erasure of the Indigenous history of Nashville. The archaeological research can be a way to preserve Indigenous history, culture, and heritage. Otherwise, the history of past peoples and civilizations will be irrevocably lost with the eradication of thousands of years of antiquity and the remains of the ancient metropolis that has for too long gone completely unrecognized.
Albert Bender is a Cherokee activist, historian, political columnist, and freelance reporter for Native and Non-Native publications. He is currently writing a legal treatise on Native American sovereignty and working on a book on the war crimes committed by the U.S. against the Maya people in the Guatemalan civil war He is a consulting attorney on Indigenous sovereignty, land restoration, and Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) issues and a former staff attorney with Legal Services of Eastern Oklahoma (LSEO) in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
This article originally appeared on People's World. It is published under a Creative Commons license.
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