Moccasin Bend lecture series starts Monday

photo Staff Photo by John Rawlston In this file photo from Feb. 6, 2007, Shawn Benge is seen at Point Park atop Lookout Mountain. In the background is Moccasin Bend, which became a part of the park system four years ago.

IF YOU GOThe first lecture in the 2015 series starts at 7 p.m. Monday in the University Center auditorium at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Admission and parking are free to the public.• Monday, newly appointed Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park Superintendent Brad Bennett will speak on his 25-year experience in the park service.• On Oct. 20, historian and author Vicki Rozema will speak on how science and technology in the South helped to played a roll in the 1838 Cherokee Removal.• On Nov. 10, Cherokee Nation Supreme Court Justice Troy Wayne Poteete will speak about why Cherokee people mark and commemorate the Trail of Tears.

About 9,000 years ago, Moccasin Bend was a very different scene.

There were no buildings or roads. Instead, groups of hunter-gatherers lived on the land, hunted in the dense forest and cooked food by the river.

Some 8,000 years later, hundreds of Native Americans lived in a walled village. A few hundred wattle-and-daub houses sat along the bank of the Tennessee River or adjacent to cleared farmland.

And in 1838, the ancestors of those people were pushed west, against their will, leaving a land their people had lived on for centuries.

That's the Moccasin Bend Kay Parish wants people to remember. She's the interim director for Friends of Moccasin Bend, which is kicking off its ninth annual lecture series Monday. Two other lectures will be held in October and November.

"People in this community really don't know much about the 12,000 years of human history on Moccasin Bend. Chattanooga is the only metropolitan area that the [National Park Service] has identified as having this resource this close to the community," Parish said.

This year's lecture series is focusing on the Friends of Moccasin Bend's effort to reopen the Old Federal Road, an important Civil War supply line that previously served as the start of the Trail of Tears for local Native Americans. The trail crosses the Bend toward Brown's Ferry, across the river.

UTC anthropology professor Nicholas Honerkamp said the Bend is important to preserve, specifically for its centuries of human history. The site is unique because every period of prehistoric Native American civilization is represented there - a rarity in archaeology. Most other sites have been disturbed or weren't used consistently through history.

"All the periods are there, and they are in one site. That classic scenario of a layer cake, it's there. It's got significant layers over time there that's unique to the site," Honerkamp said.

Parish said the event is free an open to the public, but Friends of Moccasin Bend will accept donations.

"This is more of a 'friend raiser' than a fundraiser," she said.

Contact staff writer Louie Brogdon at lbrogdon@timesfreepress.com, at @glbrogdoniv on Twitter or at 423-757-6481.

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