George Pawley met with Cherokee leaders at the Chota townhouse, indicating Chota had usurped Tanasi as the more dominant town. Missionary William Richardson visited the Overhill towns in the late 1750s and described Chota and Tanasi as being separated by a "small river." Richardson's description is supported by Timberlake's 1762 map, which recorded the two towns' sites. Archaeological findings Cyrus Thomas, working for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology in the late 1880s, conducted a mound survey at the Chota-Tanasi site. Thomas reported the discovery of 13 burials and several artifacts. In 1939, Thomas Lewis and Madeline Kneburg directed an excavation at the Chota-Tanasi site with funding by the Works Progress Administration to pay for laborers. Lewis and Kneburg, who were searching for cultural data with which to compare their earlier finds at Hiwassee Island, uncovered 22 burials, 85 pit features, 982 postmolds, and one structure. With the sites threatened by flooding from a dam and reservoir project, between 1969 and 1974, University of Tennessee archaeologists conducted excavations at the Chota-Tanasi site to establish history and recover as many artifacts as possible. Two excavations— one in 1970 and one in 1972— were focused specifically on Tanasi. Although artifacts dating to the Archaic period (and even a fluted projectile point dating to the Paleo-Indian period) were uncovered at the Chota-Tanasi sites, the excavations were focused mostly on period of Cherokee occupation. Investigators hoped to identify the locations of each town and to find evidence that might define the Cherokee peoples' relationship to those occupying the area in the South Appalachian Mississippian culture-era (c. 1000–1600 A.D.). The 1972 excavations uncovered 191 features, 22 burials, 1005 postmolds, and 6 structures at the Tanasi site alone. Two townhouses were uncovered at the Chota-Tanasi sites, one of which was slightly smaller and older than the other. The older of the two townhouses may have been the Tanasi townhouse, which traders and emissaries had reported in the 1720s. But, it is also possible that the older townhouse was an earlier version of the Chota townhouse, and that excavators failed to uncover the Tanasi townhouse. The older townhouse had a diameter of just over . In 1986, the remains of the 22 burials uncovered at Tanasi— along with those uncovered at Chota— were reinterred in a burial mound at the Sequoyah Museum near Vonore. References Resources Mooney, James. "Myths of the Cherokee" (1900, reprint 1995). External links