Nashville in the Civil War

This article pertains to the history of Nashville, the state capital of Tennessee.

The first known settlers in the area of modern Nashville were Native Americans who arrived in the region by at least 13,000 BC during the Paleoindian period of regional prehistory. For millennia the descendants of these first Tennesseans continued to live along the river terraces and uplands overlooking the Cumberland River, leaving behind a dense archaeological record spanning the Paleoindian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian periods. The final prehistoric Native American culture to inhabit what would become Nashville was a regional manifestation of the Mississippian Culture known as Middle Cumberland Mississippian, identified by archaeologists based on the specific combination of burial practices, artistic style, and ceramic typology. Recent studies suggest that Middle Cumberland Mississippian culture may be the result of interactions between local populations and outsiders from the American Bottom who moved into the western portion of the Nashville Basin around AD 1000, settling at the site of Mound Bottom. The archaeological footprint of the Middle Cumberland Mississippian culture appears throughout Nashville as the many earthen mounds, extensive stone box cemeteries, palisaded villages, and small prehistoric farmsteads that have been destroyed by antiquarian scholars, relic hunters, and urban development. All archaeological evidence for Mississippian culture appears to vanish from the Nashville area by around AD 1475–1500. Archaeologists believe this regional collapse may have been the result of extreme pressures brought on by rapid population growth and dwindling resource availability following prolonged droughts leading to increased occurrences of disease, nutritional deficiencies, and warfare.

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