Cloudsplitter Rockshelter (Menifee County)

Dry sand preserved a roughly 3,700-year-old squash rind—early evidence that people here were tending plants—as well as chipped and ground stone tools and pollen that tracks climate change.

Later Woodland layers at Cloudsplitter and neighboring Gorge shelters (Newt Kash, Haystack, Rogers) show storage pits, seed crops such as sunflower, sumpweed, maygrass, and knotweed, and a shift from nut-heavy foraging toward small-scale gardens. The Gorge’s dry shelters are why eastern Kentucky figures so largely in the story of plant domestication in eastern North America.