scattered across the area just south of Fort Loudoun, including three which stand in a line immediately south of the fort. Tuskegee is one of three towns on Timberlake's map that lacks a communal townhouse (the other two being Tanasi and Mialoquo), suggesting that it was a smaller settlement. Timberlake noted that Attakullakulla was the head-man of both Tuskegee and Mialoquo, and that Tuskegee was home to 55 fighters. In response to a Cherokee attack against the Watauga settlements in the summer of 1776, Colonel William Christian led an invasion force to the Little Tennessee Valley in October of that year. Finding the Overhill towns deserted, Christian burned five, including Tuskegee. This was targeted for retaliation because the Cherokee had killed a settler boy whom they captured during the Watauga attack. Tuskegee was not likely rebuilt or reinhabited after this Anglo-American attack. Subsequent travelers to the area, including those visiting the ruins of Fort Loudoun from the American Tellico Blockhouse in the 1790s, make no mention of the town. The Cherokee scholar Sequoyah (c.1770-1843), the creator of the Cherokee syllabary, was born at Tuskegee and lived in this area until the early 19th century. He was the son of a Cherokee woman named Wurtah and Nathaniel Gist, a fur trader. He grew up with his mother and her people, speaking only Cherokee for years. He is one of the few people from a pre-literate society known to have independently created an effective writing system. His syllabary inspired the development of 21 other scripts, used in a total of 65 languages across the world. In the late 20th century, the Tennessee Valley Authority planned the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, with an accompanying lake that would flood many Cherokee and older indigenous sites along the river. The historic Tuskegee site was among those flooded after completion of Tellico Dam in 1979. The adjacent Fort Loudoun site was raised above lake operating levels, and the fort was reconstructed. Two Cherokee dwellings, a "summer" house and "winter" house, have been reconstructed just south of the fort to represent Tuskegee. The Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, dedicated to the Cherokee scholar, stands along Highway 360, opposite Fort Loudoun State Park. Archaeological work and findings The Tennessee Division of Archaeology conducted excavations at the Tuskegee site (40MR4, 40MR24 and 40MR64) in the summer of 1976 in anticipation of the completion of Tellico Dam. Since TVA