Michelle Willard, Daily News Journal, March 13, 2015
Tanya Peres, right, the director of the archeology field school and MTSU professor, looks on as Tara Imoto, left, and Jessica O’Neill dig at the Magnolia Valley site in Eagleville in this file photo.
MURFREESBORO — Before the ancient Britons built Stonehenge and writing was first introduced in the Middle East, a small group of Native Americans had established a temporary camp in Eagleville.
The remains of that camp were uncovered last summer by MTSU professor Dr. Tanya Peres and her archaeological field school for MTSU students at the Magnolia Valley equestrian farm in Eagleville.
“People were here. This was more than just scraping by,” Peres said Saturday morning, Feb. 28, at the monthly meeting of the Rutherford County Archaeological Society.
RCAS will meet at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Heritage Center of Rutherford County on College Street in Murfreesboro. Dr. Hugh Berryman, director of the MTSU Forensic Institute for Research and Education is the featured speaker.
It has been long believed that few humans lived in Rutherford County prior to European contact, she said.
Peres is on a mission to prove that theory wrong and the findings from Eagleville go a long way to disproving it.
On Saturday, Peres spoke about two distinct findings at the site.
The first was an earth oven. She explained an earth oven is a hole lined with rocks in which additional heated rocks are placed to indirectly cook food.
“This is pretty great,” she said, adding the oven was about two feet across and filled with charcoal and other debris left by the cooking process.
The presence of an earth oven is evidence Native Americans did more than just hunt in Rutherford County, she said.
To top that, the oven was located next to what Peres thinks was a dugout house.
“In the Archaic, some kind of tent structure would cover the hole,” she said, adding the home was temporary and easily movable.
Artifacts found at the site of the Archeology field school in Eagleville in 2014.
Peres said evidence from the two features was dated to 5,300 years ago, placing them squarely in the Archiac period.
During this era, Native Americans traveled in small groups and set up seasonal camps along streams, springs and larger waterways, Peres explained.
She also uncovered evidence that Native Americans lived at the site as recently as AD 1200. But it was just in one spot and more investigation is needed to figure out how extensive the occupation was, she said.
The field school also uncovered a historic horse and buggy road that likely led from a historic homestead on the property to Allisonia Road, Peres said.
The track was hidden beneath a layer of uniform-sized limestone rocks.
Peres said the students were even able to test their theory that it was a buggy track thanks to Mary Tune, who owns a carriage from the late 1800s.
“And it fit,” Peres said.
Peres explained she chose Magnolia Valley because former student Jesse Tune suggested they use his mother’s land in Eagleville for an eight-week field school, designed for archeology students at MTSU to gain first-hand knowledge of the techniques required to work in the field.
Mary Tune purchased the land in 2006 and her son, being a curious archeologist, did some digging in 2008 and found artifacts that suggested humans lived on the farm in the Paleo Era, which dates roughly from 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, to the Archaic Era, which dates roughly from 3,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Peres’ analysis of the data collected at the field school backs up Tune’s initial findings.
Peres’ work in Eagleville isn’t through yet. She plans another field school in the summer of 2016 to help further rewrite the prehistory of Rutherford County.
Contact Michelle Willard at 615-278-5164 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter@MichWillard.