Coats-Hines Site
The Coats-Hines site is an archaeological site located in Williamson County, Tennessee in the Southeastern United States. The site is significant in that it is one of only a very few sites in Eastern North America that contains direct evidence of Paleoindian hunting of proboscideans. Excavations at the site have yielded portions of four mastodon skeletons, including one in direct association with Paleoindian stone tools. The results of excavations have been published in Tennessee Conservationist, and the scholarly journals Current Research in the Pleistocene and Tennessee Archaeology. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 12, 2011.
The Coats-Hines site is located east of I-65 near CoolSprings Galleria in Williamson County, Tennessee. The site was initially recorded in 1977 when several large bones were identified during landscaping at the Crockett Springs Golf Course (now the Nashville Golf and Athletic Club). Salvage work by staff from the Tennessee Division of Archaeology recovered the partial skeleton of a single mature female mastodon (“mastodon A”) from along a small stream drainage. No description of this excavation or the skeletal material was ever published, and the area that contained the remains was subsequently destroyed by earthmoving along the 13th hole of the golf course.
In 1994, construction of a subdivision just west of the golf course by Hines Interest LP resulted in identification of a well-preserved bone bed of Pleistocene-aged faunal material. The bone bed was situated 20 metres (65 feet 7 1⁄2 inches) west of the original mastodon find along a deeply incised portion of the same stream channel, approximately 2 metres (6 feet 6 1⁄2 inches) below ground surface. Salvage excavations resulted in the identification of several late ice age species, including horse, deer, muskrat, and the partial, disarticulated remains of a young male mastodon (“mastodon B”) The remains of a third mastodon (“mastodon C”) were identified eroding from the bank line approximately 50 m west of mastodon B, but were not excavated.
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