The Carlston Annis Shell Mound (designated 15 BT 5) is a prominent archaeological site in the western part of the U.S. state of Kentucky. Located along the Green River in Butler County, this shell midden has been declared a historic site because of its archaeological value.
Geography
The Carlson Annis Shell Mound sits on the eastern side of the Green River, somewhat more than east of the shoreline. Because it lies in the river's floodplain, the mound is the highest point in the area; its top is typically dry even though the surrounding terrain be flooded. It occupies a dark loamy soil, although the edges of the mound are covered by a substantially lighter loam with mixtures of sand and clay. Since the mound was formed, the river has changed its course; it appears to have flowed directly by the base of the mound as it was being created. When the area was first settled in the early nineteenth century, the floodplain was recognized as valuable farmland, and because the mound is an island during floods, settlers saw it as a place of refuge; for most of the time since whites arrived, farmsteads have occupied its summit.
Measuring approximately from north to south and east to west, the mound rises approximately above the surrounding terrain. The shells extend down from the surface by from the center; the difference between the heights is the result of floods since the midden was created, which have deposited multiple layers of earth around the base.
Excavation
In 1939, archaeologists from the University of Kentucky began to excavate the Annis Mound under the leadership of W.D. Funkhouser and W.S. Webb. Initial surveys found minimal damage to the site: a well had been dug into the center, and the surface was slightly affected by the foundations of buildings on the top, and neighbors from miles around were frequently digging from the edge to procure shells for use as chicken feed. Excavations began with the digging of a trench through the southern portion of the mound, after which the mound was divided into blocks of so that the locations of artifacts could more accurately be plotted on diagrams. The initial excavation produced evidence of 129 different features: Hearths — 71 Fire basins — 21 Burned clay patches — 4 Pits — 12 Caches of stone tools — 10 Caches of lithic flakes — 8 Caches of other objects — 3 This concentration of features was comparable to what had previously been found at other Archaic period shell middens in the region, demonstrating the similarity of the builders to other regional peoples: they lived in the vicinity, ate substantial numbers of shellfish, used the site as a trash heap for the shells, and buried their dead in the midden. Beside 390 human bodies, the site produced the skeletons of 28 dogs that showed evidence of having been buried. Many of the bones at the site were substantially decomposed, so the painstaking osteological research undertaken at the comparable Indian Knoll site (15 OH 2) could not be repeated at Carlson Annis. Nevertheless, some information could be determined from certain bodies: ages ranged from infancy well into adulthood, more than half of the bodies (215) were accompanied by artifacts — of which 73% were matters of personal clothing, such as shell gorgets, beads, or hairpins — and some of the bodies were clearly those of victims of violence, such as a group of four that were buried together with projectile points embedded in some of the bones. While earlier publications' analyses were based largely on the presence of these embedded projectile points, more recent scholars have found evidence that bodies were injured in other fashions, such as by clubbing, and injuries that produce no effect upon the skeleton may also have been responsible for some of the deaths. Studies of other sites in the region suggest that some resources were plentiful enough to permit populations to double approximately every thirty years; this likely would have produced competition for other resources, leading to warfare. Overall life expectancy at birth was somewhat more than twenty years; 29.7% of the skeletons were of children under five years of age, of which nearly three-quarters were infants, although examination of these skeletons produced no evidence of violence.