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The University of Alabama, Office of Archaeological Research recently completed excavation of the Whitesburg Bridge site (1Ma10), a large, multicomponent shell midden and associated village site on the north bank of the Tennessee River. The project was undertaken through a contract with the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) and the Federal Highway Administration.

Located 3 km south of the present-day city of Huntsville, Alabama, the Whitesburg Bridge site includes prehistoric occupations dating from the Late Archaic Period (approximately 3300 B.P.) through the Missisippian Stage (approximately 500 B.P.). In addition, an historic component exists as a result of mid- nineteenth to early twentieth century farming and industrial activities.

The site has been subject to extensive disturbance. In 1931, the Whitesburg Bridge was built to replace White's Ferry which crossed just downstream from Ditto's Landing. The bridge required the construction of a large earthen abutment on the north bank of the river. The material for this abutment was excavated from a large borrow area in the central portion of the site. Another borrow pit was later created in the western portion of the site, and in 1964, a second bridge was built to accommodate the increased flow of traffic.

Previous Investigations at 1MA10

Large-scale archaeological investigation at the site began in the late 1930s. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Alabama Museum of Natural History conducted excavations at the site between 1939 and 1940. The University of Alabama, Office of Archaeological Research's current investigations began in 1999 with Phase II testing and background research.

As early as the 19th century, the Whitesburg Bridge site has captured the attention of both the public and archaeologists. The shell midden, or "shell mound," representing hundreds of years of cultural occupation is one of the most prominent features of the Tennessee River shoreline.
The earliest documentation of the site is credited to Cyrus Thomas in the 1890-1891 12th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology in which his research on Mound Explorations was published. Through his congressionally sanctioned effort to disprove the idea of a "Moundbuilder race", Thomas documented and described the Whitesburg Site as "a long shell heap, between 400 and 500 yards in length and about 3 or 4 feet high…"

Following Thomas, Clarence B. Moore published a brief synopsis of his visit to the site in the 1915 Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Volume XVI. Moore wrote,
At White's Ferry, on property of Mr. Lawson White, of Huntsville, Ala., is a dwelling-site and shell deposit similar to a number along the river in this region. As the site was planted in grass and clover, digging was out of the question (Moore 1915:278).

The passing of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act (1933) marked the beginning of the largest archaeological research project ever undertaken in the Southeast. Part of the goal was the construction of lock and dam systems and the creation of several artificially inundated reservoirs within the surrounding Pickwick, Wheeler, and Guntersville Basins. Prior to the passage of the act, the Alabama Museum of Natural History, with funds provided by the National Research Council, conducted a survey of the Wheeler Basin. During the 1932 survey, Dr. Walter B. Jones and James Hays documented the Whitesburg Bridge site and recorded it in the Alabama State Site File. The site file designation of 1Ma10 derives from this survey. While investigating the site, Jones and Hays recovered steatite vessel fragments, plain pottery sherds, "flint" chips, projectile points, and human skeletal remains (Webb 1939).

Site 1Ma10 did not undergo intensive archaeological investigations until the TVA had already closed the flood gates to Wheeler Dam, raising the water table, and impacting the southern portion of the shell midden deposits. However, it was not until the completion, in January of 1939, of Guntersville Dam, located approximately 25 km upstream from the site, that a Huntsville based WPA work crew became available and was put to excavating the Whitesburg Bridge site. Under the direction of H. Summerfield Day and Hugh Capps, they labored from January 26, 1939 until April, 1940. During the last seven months of the excavation, a crew of African American men and women finished the fieldwork.

Day cleared and staked out five blocks and fourteen exploratory trenches to excavate the shell midden area of the site. Using the field techniques of the day, the exploratory trenches were established to identify the stratigraphy of the site and to guide excavations. The trenches were designed to outline the blocks and reveal the natural strata. The block excavations were divided into five-foot units and began with work on Block 3, which was completely excavated by natural zones. The remaining blocks were excavated in the order of 2,1,4, and 5. In Block 1, Zone A was removed and the rest of the block was excavated in one foot levels. Block 2 was excavated in a similar manner, with the removal of Natural Zones A and B and the rest of the block taken out in one foot levels. As for Blocks 4 and 5, both blocks were taken down in one foot arbitrary levels with no regard to the natural stratigraphy.

Information about zones or strata observed during the WPA investigations is taken from William S. Webb and David L. DeJarnette's 1948 report. Based on the information from the pottery and lithic studies, Webb and DeJarnette (1948:14-16) concluded that Zones A and B are associated with the then designated Pottery 2 Period, Zone C is described as associated with the Pottery 1 Period, Zone D is considered to have an Archaic 3 occupation. Finally, Zone E is associated with an Archaic 2 occupation.

Since the dirt from the excavation was not screened, artifact recovery from 1Ma10 was contingent upon the discretion of each crewmember. All artifacts from the WPA excavation were given an individual field specimen number. Each number provided the provenience that was recorded for the artifacts' location.

A total of 1,500 artifacts received field specimen numbers during the course of excavation. An additional 472 field specimen numbers were assigned to artifacts in the laboratory. Some of the items on the field specimen list include; "flint" points and tools; steatite and sandstone vessel fragments; copper ornaments; stone bannerstones, hoes, and celts; slate ornaments and abraders; shell beads; clay objects; bone tools; and pottery.

Artifact analysis was conducted at the Central Archaeological Laboratory in Birmingham, Alabama. Over 4,500 pottery sherds were recovered during field investigations. Marion L. Dunlevy assigned each sherd to a pottery category and generated tabulation tables to illustrate the type distribution for each excavation block. The most common pottery type recovered during the WPA excavations was Long Branch Fabric Marked (n=3,884). Block 4 had the highest pottery sherd count with the recovery of 746.

James Foster, an archaeologist with TVA conducted the lithic analysis. Foster analyzed over 4,280 lithic artifacts and classified projectile points using the Guntersville and Pickwick classificatory systems (Webb and DeJarnette 1942:8-9, 1948:41-42). The other lithic categories included, scrapers, drills, "spalls," broken unclassified, and unfinished unclassified. Using this information, Foster was also able to create a tabulation table for tools and projectile point types to compare distribution in each zone. It is apparent from the collection and from our re-excavation of a portion of a WPA test trench, that none of the lithic debitage recovered in the field was kept for future study.

Other artifacts recovered from the site include five steatite and two sandstone bowls. Of the seven stone vessels recovered, six were found associated with features. The majority of stone vessel fragments were found in the Natural Zone D deposit. A total of 204 steatite and 182 sandstone vessel fragments were found, further supporting an Archaic 3 (or Late Archaic) occupation in Zone D.

Twenty-nine cultural features were recorded during the WPA excavations. These features include circular fire pits in the shell (n=7), fired clay hearth areas (n=10), concentration of gastropods (n=1), fire basins floored with river pebbles (n=2), dog burials (n=9), and human burials (n=117). No separate documentation or artifacts for these features were found.

Other features identified during the fieldwork, but which were not given feature numbers, were numerous circular pits intrusive into Zone E. These pits were not assigned a feature number because their purpose was not obvious and their contents were not different from that of Zone E deposits. Webb and DeJarnette (1948:18) do comment that these pits may have been "storage bins or midden pits".

University of Alabama, Office of Archaeological Research Excavations at 1Ma10

The completion of the WPA excavations at Site 1Ma10 in the Spring of 1940 marked the end of large-scale investigation at the site until Phase II archaeological testing began in 1999 (Meeks 2002). Regardless of the amount of disturbance resulting from earlier excavations and even earlier historic disturbances, much of the site remains intact. As a result, the need to mitigate the area to be impacted by the new bridge was recognized during the initial planning stages of the Whitesburg Bridge replacement project. William Turner, ALDOT Archaeologist, worked with the engineers to avoid as much of the shell midden as possible. The known presence of human burials concentrated within the shell midden clearly pointed to the need for avoidance. The footings were designed to be placed far enough north to avoid the location of the shell midden and the known concentration of human burials as defined by the 1939-40 WPA excavations and the more recent Phase II testing (Meeks 2002).

Within our Block 2 excavation, a portion of the shell midden was located. In addition, the excavation of an isolated test unit (N5014E5100.5) resulted in the identification of not only intact shell midden, but also the southern edge of the WPA 55 foot trench. Also, in the Phase II backhoe testing, the WPA L-50 trench was found in Trench #1 but not any further north in Trench #6.

Using the information from this test unit, backhoe trenches, and WPA photographs taken from their excavations, we generated a map showing the general location of the WPA excavations in relation to the 1999 Phase II testing and the 2002 mitigation of the site.

Another interesting observation noted during the Phase II testing, was found in Backhoe Trench 7. This trench was carried to 660 cm below ground surface. At the base of the trench, an organic rich, dark gray (5YR4/1), micaceous clay was encountered. A sample (Beta 138586) of organic sediment taken from ca. 580 cmbs returned a conventional radiocarbon date of 6240 + 90 B.P. The stratum is recognized as a remnant of the abandoned Tennessee River channel prior to its southern migration. The buried stratum, combined with dates obtained from the site, indicate that the terrace on which the site exists was forming no earlier than the mid-Holocene (5000-6000 B.P.) (Meeks 2002) and any significant cultural deposits would not predate the Middle Archaic.

Indeed, the recent excavations support the evidence that the deepest intact cultural deposit was laid down during the Late Archaic. The stratigraphy recognized during the course of our excavations includes five separate strata definable across the entire areal extent of the excavation. These tie in well with the stratigraphy or natural zones described by Webb and DeJarnette (1948:14-16).

Our investigations began with the excavation of a 30 m long line of 2 m by 2 m units. Within this line, the broadly defined stratigraphy for Block 1 was outlined to include Stratum I; consisting of historic overburden and ranging from 20 cm to more than 90 cm in thickness. Much of this stratum was mechanically removed.

Stratum II consists of organic rich, black (7.5YR2.5/1) silty loam upper midden deposit with the upper 10 to 15 cm disturbed by plow zone and the lower intact portion containing middle Gulf Formational (including Wheeler Plain and Alexander Punctated Var. Columbus), Woodland (predominantly Long Branch Fabric Marked) pottery, and a very limited amount of Mississippian (Mississippi Plain) pottery. The midden and plow zone correspond with natural Zones A and B defined by Webb and DeJarnette (1948:14)

Underlying the upper midden are alluvial deposits forming Stratum III and corresponding to Zone C (Webb and DeJarnette 1948:14). Although Webb and DeJarnette (1948:14) refer to this stratum as "nearly sterile," isolated microstrata containing sealed cultural deposits are present within the 40+ cm of yellowish brown, silty and very fine sandy clay.

Stratum IV includes the remains of a Late Archaic occupation (lower midden) with dates of 3100 B.P. to 3400 B.P. obtained from 11 separate features. Our Stratum IV corresponds with Webb and DeJarnette's (1948:14) Zone D. However, only in the southernmost portion of our excavations, closest to the riverbank, did we encounter the shell midden deposit that Webb and DeJarnette (1948) described.

The two separate shell middens were identified as Features 202 and 241. The remainder of the Stratum IV deposits that do not include shell midden (Feature 241 Cal BP 3460 to 3320) consists of dense concentrations of charcoal (i.e. Feature 315 Cal BP 3550 to 2940), which are differentiated from fire hearths (i.e. Feature 32 Cal BP 3460 to 3460 to 3340), prepared clay surfaces (i.e. Feature 37 and Feature 70 Cal BP 3460 to 3320), as well as scattered post holes, and storage pits.

Lying atop the Stratum IV, the Late Archaic midden deposit, is Feature 70. The feature consists of a massive, circular, prepared clay surface stretching more than 14 m from north to south and 12 m east to west.

The current maximum height of the bright red (5YR5/6 yellowish red) clay is approximately 48 cm. However, the upper portion of the feature has been truncated by apparent erosion and the Stratum II upper midden deposit.

Several dates have been gathered from samples both mixed in the clay fill and isolated ash and charcoal scatters around the base of the feature. The dates range from Cal BP 4830 to 3670 for the mixed samples to Cal BP 3460 to 3320 for the materail at the base of the slope.

Finally, a sterile silty and very fine sandy micaceous clay with minor gleying underlies the site and is recognized as Stratum V or natural Zone E (Webb and DeJarnette 1948:14).

A total of 379 features and 8 burial features containing all or part of 11 individuals were encountered during the 2002 excavations as compared to 29 features and 117 human burials reported by Webb and DeJarnette (1948). The WPA field specimen count included 1,500 specimens identified in the field. The 2002 excavations documented the vertical and horizontal location of over 961 field specimens. Artifacts recorded during excavation as field specimens, include diagnostic projectile points, pottery sherds, stone vessel fragments; various chipped and ground stone tools, and bone and antler tools. Also, over one million artifacts that did not receive field specimen numbers, have been taken back to the DeJarnette laboratory in Moundville for analysis.

The seven months spent excavating the Whitesburg Bridge site resulted in the excavation of 226 square meters to depths in excess of 3 m. This is compared to the 15 months spent excavating the site in 1939 and 1940 when 985 square meters were excavated to depths ranging from 2-3 meters.

The WPA excavations provided an excellent window for assessing 1Ma10's significance and stimulating future research on the Middle Tennessee Valley population during the Late Archaic Period, and the Gulf Formational, Woodland, and Mississippian Stages. The 2002 University of Alabama mitigation has generated a well documented, closely controlled, massive sample of both the shell midden deposits and the associated intact non-shell village midden to the north. New insights into the areal extent of the Whitesburg Bridge site, as well as the geomorph-ological aspects of the site's development, specilalized processing and manufacturing loci, and cultural variability through time is the focus of our current and continuing research of the data recovered from the Whitesburg Bridge site.

The crew of University of Alabama, 2002 excavations at the Whitesburg Bridge site.