Location | Benton County, Tennessee, USA |
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Region | Benton County, Tennessee |
Coordinates | 36°4′29.17″N 87°58′59.34″W / 36.0747694°N 87.9831500°W |
History | |
Cultures | Archaic period |
Site notes | |
Excavation dates | 1940 |
The Eva site (40BN12) is a prehistoric Native American site in Benton County, Tennessee, in the Southeastern United States. Located along an ancient channel of the Tennessee River, the Eva site saw extensive periods of occupation during the Middle and Late Archaic period (c. 6000-1000 BC). The site's well-defined midden layers helped investigators identify three distinct Archaic cultures, the oldest of which was first identified at Eva and is still known as the "Eva culture" or the "Eva phase."
The Eva site is now submerged by Kentucky Lake, an artificial reservoir created by the impoundment of the Tennessee River by Kentucky Dam. In 1940, before the Tennessee River was dammed to form Kentucky Lake, University of Tennessee archaeologists conducted excavations at the Eva site and managed to extract a relatively large amount of data. The data and artifacts were analyzed by University of Tennessee anthropologists Thomas Lewis and Madeline Kneburg Lewis, who presented their findings in a 1961 publication entitled Eva, an Archaic Site.