Dr. Ben Steere is the director of the Cherokee Studies program and associate professor of anthropology at Western Carolina University. Dr. Steere has worked on a collaborative study of ancestral Cherokee mound and town sites with the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI THPO) since 2011. He is the author of The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast (University of Alabama Press) and the recipient of the 2016 Principal Chief Leon D. Jones Award for Archaeological Excellence, presented by the EBCI THPO.

Over the last 20 years, archaeologists working in western North Carolina in close collaboration with the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians have carried out large-scale excavations that have uncovered the well-preserved post patterns of hundreds of ancestral Cherokee houses dating from approximately AD 500 to 1775 in southwestern North Carolina. This new architectural dataset has the potential to improve our understanding of daily life in ancestral Cherokee communities. How did house construction change over time, and what can these changes tell us about Cherokee families and their relationships within and between communities? In this paper I compare hundreds of houses from several large archaeological sites on the Qualla Boundary and surrounding counties and discuss patterns of change and continuity in house construction and community layout.

Thank you all very much for coming to hear my talk today. I gave it a really awful title hoping that folks wouldn’t show up to it, but here you are, so here we are indeed. I guess first of all, I’m Dr. Ben Steere, a professor at Western Carolina University. I want to welcome you to Cherokee. If you have not been here before, you’ve got especially good weather to be in such a beautiful place. So welcome, welcome.

I want to take a moment too to thank the Trail of Tears Association for all the hard work organizing this conference. There’s a lot of work that goes into this, so thanks to them. My paper is titled “Cherokee Architecture: New Insights from Cultural Resource Management Archaeology in Southwestern North Carolina.” The very short thesis for this talk is that over the last 20 years, there have been a series of really massive cultural resource management projects here in southwestern North Carolina that have essentially uncovered the entire footprints of ancestral Cherokee communities in this part of the world. Some of my colleagues and I, in a lot of ways, are still kind of just starting to synthesize that new work and try to make sense of what it means. I was delighted to have this opportunity to share this information in Cherokee, in particular, with folks from Cherokee Nation, Eastern Band, and Cherokee Indians. What does it all mean, right? There has been a whole lot of earth-moving in the last 20 years, and it turns out there’s a lot of really interesting new stuff we’ve learned.

I want to begin my paper with acknowledgments because I’ve got a bad habit of running my talks fast at the end. A lot of all the work that you’re going to see presented today was overseen by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Historic Preservation Office. I’ll be sharing work that was primarily done by TRC, a company archaeology firm that’s contracted for many projects with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Especially, my good colleagues Tasha Benyshek and Paul Webb are the actual archaeologists who have done and directed much of the fieldwork that I’ll be synthesizing and talking about today. My colleagues at Western Carolina, Brett Riggs, who you all know, but also Jane Eastman, another archaeologist and cultural expert, and Tom Belt have been very helpful in helping me interpret this information. Also, the Western Carolina Hunter Library, where I have a University Research Fellowship this year, has allowed me to teach fewer classes and spend more time in the library. Some of the work I’m presenting today comes from that fellowship I’m doing right now.

This is a place that many of you may be familiar with; it’s the new Cherokee K-12 School, although it’s been up and running for over 10 years now. This is sort of how I remember the Cherokee School complex because I spent the first half of my 20s on my hands and knees working down there when TRC was doing archaeology over the footprint of that school site. This is a photograph taken in either late 2004 or early 2005 of a group of Cherokee students from the Cherokee AP History Class coming to visit the future site of the Cherokee school. They’re standing over the remains of a circa 1740s Cherokee winter house that’s being excavated there by archaeologists working with TRC. This is really where I fell in love with doing Cherokee archaeology and particularly doing collaborative archaeology with folks in the Eastern Band and trying to quickly and directly report results from fieldwork that was happening. It’s also where I sort of fell in love with houses.

This is the overall site map of the Ravensford site. It’s really multiple archaeology sites, multiple components. For folks who are familiar with this landscape, there’s the old Big Cove Road that you may have been familiar with and the newly routed Big Cove Road. Over the footprint of this 40-acre archaeological excavation, I think to date the largest excavation in the state of North Carolina, the real star of the show there were these well-preserved ancestral Cherokee houses. I know this is kind of a hard map to see, especially if you’re in the back, but in the red here are 18th-century Cherokee households, so house pairs of well-preserved winter and summer houses: one, two, three, four households represented there from the 18th century. In blue are early Mississippian phase houses, roughly from the 1400s to 1500s, so a community there from that time period. In green, using archaeological terminology based on the house patterns and ceramics, is an early Pisgah phase community from around 1,000 to 1,300 A.D., give or take. Multiple communities were out there at Ravensford, and you can see change over time. What’s particularly cool about Ravensford is that we’re here in the out towns, and this is like out in the out towns. This is kind of like a rural community, so it’s a remarkable opportunity to get a chance to look at almost a complete rural community, a little bit farther away from the action at Nununyi and other mound sites, closer to Gadua. It offers a really interesting look at daily life.

This is the kind of data I’ll be talking about today: using large excavations and house patterns to look at communities in central Cherokee communities over time and see how they’re changing and think about what that means. Just one more example from Ravensford, partly to get you in the mindset of looking at architectural data as archaeologists. We carefully excavate almost like the blueprint of these houses. What you see when you look at the architectural remains of ancestral Cherokee houses are the remains of post-in-ground construction, digging post holes, setting upright posts to frame up your houses. We can look at these excavation maps much like blueprints that then help us reconstruct these houses. I show you this one just because it’s something you’re probably familiar with for this particular crowd, which has a higher archaeology IQ than most crowds I talk to. There’s an 18th-century Cherokee winter house and summer house pair. This is what it looks like on the ground in blueprint form, and then an artist’s reconstruction for you.

Over the last 20 years, there have been several large-scale excavations in southwestern North Carolina, many of them tribally sponsored, fieldwork carried out by TRC and other CRM companies under the direction of the Eastern Band’s THPO. Just for fun, this is a recent one. This is what’s under the new parking lot that’s currently under construction right outside at a site archaeologists would call 31JK291 or the Magic Waters site. Thanks to Tasha Benyshek for showing this hot-off-the-presses map. This is a Pigeon phase community, so early middle Woodland, around 400 A.D., give or take, with large circular houses, many of which were reconstructed over time as households come and go. But throughout time, there was a clear open area, almost like a plaza, that would have been the center of that community. This is currently under that gravel parking lot just outside. Per Tasha and other archaeologists who work up here, this is one of the earliest, best-preserved permanent middle Woodland villages in the state. This is really significant, and it’s one of many significant archaeological sites I’ll show you that will change the way we think about the ancestral Cherokee landscape out here.

I’ve been interested in architecture for a long time, especially… To back up a little bit, I teach in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Western Carolina. My department head says I’m like a closet sociologist because I’m really interested in big-scale patterns of change. What archaeologists are really good at is pattern recognition, especially when we have a lot of data to step back and take that 10,000-foot view and look at entire communities changing over time. That’s a strength of our discipline. That’s something I’m interested in doing, comparing how communities change over time, specifically here in this part of the Cherokee world. Looking at changing architectural styles and community layouts can help us understand social and cultural ties among indigenous communities in southwestern North Carolina and beyond. Ancestral Cherokee people are cosmopolitan people; they had deep and wide social networks. Recent research from TRC has provided evidence for large public buildings, including at sites that are not big central mound sites but sites like Ravens