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Sumac Terrace

Site ID: 15Ls141

Camp
Leslie
Kentucky Archaeological Survey
Unless specified, we cannot provide site location information.

Summary

​​​​​​​​​​The Sumac Terrace site is located deep in the Eastern Mountains within the Daniel Boone National Forest’s Redbird District.  This small (60 by 100 feet) site faces south and overlooks a minor tributary to Redbird River.  Native American hunter-gatherers repeatedly visited this place from ca. 5000 to 4000 BC, during the middle portion of the Middle Archaic period.

Small groups of ancient people occasionally camped at Sumac Terrace. The spot gave them good access to natural resources located along the creek and in the uplands. The surrounding mountains also provided protection from the weather, and in particular, from strong winds associated with powerful storms. Archaeologists investigated this ancient campsite in 2022 in advance of a timber sale.  

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Rock-lined cooking pit before (left) and after (right) excavation.

Findings

​Investigators documented the remains of fire hearths, rock-filled pits, and cooking pits at Sumac Terrace. The fire hearths had fire-reddened and/or ashy soil. Cooking pits contained many fire-cracked rocks but relatively few chipped stone artifacts. Because so many pits occurred within such a small area, investigators think ancient Native hunter-gatherers returned to the Sumac Terrace locality repeatedly for over a millennium.​

Researchers also encountered a few shallow, basin-shaped pits that measured 10 to 13 feet in diameter. These kinds of pits are relatively unique in this region during the Middle Archaic period. The pits yielded a variety of chipped stone tools – like many kinds of spearpoints, as well as drills and endscrapers.  Many of the chipped stone tools at Sumac Terrace ad been heavily resharpened. This resulted in a large amount of flakes (the byproducts of chipped stone tool making) being recovered from the site. Hunting animals and processing hides required sharp stone tools!

Spearpoints from Sumac Terrace representing four different kinds of chert (also called flint) resources that come to the surface north and west of the site (note the regional map below): Breathitt (top left); Boyle (top right); Brush Creek (bottom left); and Paoli (bottom right). These spearpoints also show how much inhabitants sharpened and resharpened their stone tools; in some cases, they sharpened them to a nub, like the Paoli example.

Hickory nuts were the main plant food collected and processed at the camp. Small amounts of acorns and pecans recovered from the site show that the people who stayed at Sumac Terrace ate these nuts, too. The shallow, basin-shaped pits contained large quantities of hickory nuts. Researchers inferred that Native peoples used these pits in some way to process plant remains.  A flat, rock-covered surface found near one of these ​pits could have been a staging area for plant food processing.  

Investigators also made two surprising discoveries at Sumac Terrace. The residents at this small mountain site ate…pecan! But pecan trees grow mainly in the Mississippi Valley, and in the lower and central Ohio Valley. How did these nuts get to Sumac Terrace? Archaic peoples could have traded pecans into the area. But it seems more likely that they brought the nuts in to establish pecan production as a simple form of silviculture. It would have been relatively easy to carry in pecan nuts for planting in the eastern Kentucky mountains. 

The Middle Archaic groups who visited Sumac Terrace also used tobacco. These tiny seeds are notoriously difficult to find at archaeological sites. Evidence that specialty plants like tobacco were cultivated earlier than previously thought is gradually building. The Sumac Terrace tobacco seed adds further evidence to suggest that Native peoples began to use tobacco in the Southeastern U.S. by the Late or possibly Middle Archaic.

Chert types: top left, Breathitt; top right, Boyle; bottom left, Brush Creek; bottom right, Paoli.

What's Cool?

​Moving With the Seasons!​

​​At Sumac Terrace, about half of the chipped stone tools were made from chert sources found 50 to 100 miles north of the site.  What does this mean? It means that the Middle Archaic hunter-gatherers who stayed at Sumac Terrace likely moved seasonally within large territories. It also suggests that these people ranged from the upper reaches of the Kentucky River drainage in the Eastern Mountains to central Kentucky, and then back again.  These groups’ “seasonal rounds” would have included nearby sites in the Redbird area, too, for there are other sites like Sumac Terrace. 

This regional movement may have been one way that Middle Archaic groups responded to the periods of warmer and drier weather occurring at this time.  Perhaps these drier conditions enhanced the growth of drought-tolerant nut trees, resulting in people’s reliance on hickory nuts. Middle Archaic hunter-gatherers exploited these plant resources intensively.  The archaeological record of the Redbird District indicates that the uplands remained an important, resource-rich location throughout the Archaic period.

Distribution of non-local chert types found at the Sumac Terrace site.

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