A Dark Pathway: Precontact Native American Mud Glyphs from 1st Unnamed Cave, Tennessee

＂This book presents two decades of research at First Unnamed Cave, a precontact dark zone cave art site in East Tennessee. Discovered in 1994, First Unnamed Cave ushered in an extensive and systematic effort to research precontact cave art sites in the Eastern Woodlands and helped steer archaeological cave research for the following decades. Research into First Unnamed Cave made it clear that ancient peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, and especially in the Southeast, had practiced a widespread tradition of cave art production in the dark zones of some of the region’s many caves, and these glyphs and drawings represented a deep religious tradition among early native peoples＂--

JAN F. SIMEK is distinguished professor of science in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the coauthor or coeditor of several books and numerous articles on cave art and archaeology, including most recently The Cosmos Revealed: Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alabama.