Cultural Sequence at the Falls
Pre-Clovis Period (pre-10,000 BC)
The Paleoindian Period (10,000-8000 BC)
The Archaic Period (8000-1000 BC)
Henderson et al. (1986) define the Contact period as beginning when the first indirect effects of the European presence were felt by native cultures, roughly around AD 1540. This overlaps the end of the Late Prehistoric period by 160 years. The beginning date of this period is based on journals of the Spanish De Soto expedition through the American Southeast in the 1540s. De SotoÂ's chroniclers observed that European trade goods and diseases had preceded them. During the following centuries, native cultures were encountered and described by the encroaching Euro-American explorers and settlers.
The earliest well documented European exploration of what was to become Kentucky was by the Frenchmen Marquette and Joliet who passed by the mouth of the Ohio, and west Kentucky, in 1673 during their exploration of the Mississippi River (Alvord 1920: 63-64). Other French, English, and Spanish traders and explorers may have passed through the territory in the late seventeenth century to mid-eighteenth century as well (McBride and McBride 1990: 583). Early contact of Native Americans with Europeans in what is now Kentucky, however, may have been indirect, with European trade goods and information about Europeans spread through the existing exchange systems. During the early part of the Contact period, access to the region by Europeans was almost exclusively from the south from Spanish Florida (that extended into present-day Georgia and Alabama), and later from the north by the French in Illinois, who wrote of the Shawnee living on the Ohio River. The few surviving descriptions of the inhabitants are indirect and sketchy.
Native American inhabitants of the Kentucky region during the Contact period probably consisted of diverse Algonquian or Iroquoian speaking groups that based their economies on a combination of horticulture, fishing, hunting, and gathering. Small encampments at scattered locations coalesced into larger villages on floodplains in the spring for the cultivation of corn, beans, squash, and a few other select plants, like tobacco. Typically during this period, the native cultures underwent acculturation, a virtual breakdown of their former way of life through replacement by or approximation of the cultural norms of the dominant culture. Traditional technologies such as lithic stone tool manufacture and clay ceramic manufacture were abandoned and replaced by European items such as metal knives, pots, and other trade goods. In addition, disease increasingly reduced native populations all over the central and eastern parts of the continent during this period. In this region, epidemics are documented from the last decades of the 1500s and into the mid-1600s.
The signing of the Greenville Treaty in 1795 marks the end of the Contact period. By that document, signed by 1,100 tribal chiefs, Native Americans ceded virtually all land claims to the United States government in return for promises of firmly established territorial boundaries and other rights (Niles 1996:217). Native Americans were removed to small reservations to the north and west, leaving no Native American communities in Kentucky (Henderson et al. 1986:1-17).