Chambers Site (15Ml109): Mississippian Village in Marshall County

The Chambers site (15Ml109) is a Mississippian (opens in a new tab) village in Marshall County. It covers about six hectares, close to fifteen acres, and a stone-box cemetery was reported there. Mississippian is the name archaeologists give a way of life, not a tribe, and the villagers left no name for themselves that has come down to us.

Archaeologists learned of the site by accident in the mid-1980s, when road construction cut into it. David Pollack and Jimmy A. Railey of the Kentucky Heritage Council recorded what the construction had exposed and published their report in 1987. A suite of radiocarbon dates suggests the village was lived in from about AD 1250 to 1350.

At the edge of the cut they found two houses built with wall trenches, one about 5 by 6.4 meters and the other about 6 by 8 meters. Downslope lay a trash area some 10 by 16 meters. Test units went through more than a meter of Mississippian deposits, including the edges of a series of prepared floors and thick, dark midden.

Pollack and Railey thought the floors belonged to a terrace or bench that held a series of houses or outdoor work areas, swept and rebuilt again and again. Archaeologist R. Berle Clay later argued that they had clipped the edge of a low platform mound instead. The question is still open, and a mound would make Chambers more than an ordinary village.

The people of Chambers grew maize, gathered nuts, and raised native crops such as maygrass in larger amounts than other sites in the region. They ate far less fish than people on the Ohio and Mississippi, since their village stood away from the big rivers and the flyways of migrating birds. Their hoes were made of both Dover chert, quarried in Tennessee, and Mill Creek chert from southern Illinois.

Its pottery places Chambers in what archaeologists call the Angelly phase, with loop handles rather than the wide strap handles of later times. Serving bowls were less common than at big mound towns such as the Adams site, while cooking pans were more common. Chambers and Jonathan Creek are the best-defined Angelly phase communities in this part of Kentucky.

Kentucky today

Chambers is not a public site, and our map pin is rounded to about 10 kilometers to protect it from looting, so please do not go looking for it. To see a Mississippian town of the same centuries, visit Wickliffe Mounds State Historic Site (opens in a new tab) in Ballard County. The later Mississippian town at Tinsley Hill, in Lyon County, shows how these communities changed after Chambers was abandoned.