The land before Trussville: Artifacts from archaic camps uncovered at Hewitt-Trussville Stadium on display

On fall Friday nights, the rumble of Husky feet can be heard from the Hewitt-Trussville Stadium, but they’re just the latest in thousands of years of feet treading that ground.

Situated near Hewitt-Trussville High School and the Trussville Civic Center, the stadium site is ideal for football games and other school events. Its high ground and proximity to the Cahaba River, however, made the area a temporary or permanent home for different people groups for at least 8,000 years, according to Matthew Gage, the director of the University of Alabama Office of Archaeological Research.

“A lot of people don’t realize the antiquity of Alabama,” Gage said in a presentation to the Trussville Historical Society on Oct. 15. “It’s amazing what we can learn about people from what they left behind.”

The stadium location has been known as a possible archaeological site since the 1990s, but Gage’s department wasn’t called in to investigate until work was set to begin on the stadium in 2012. The team’s initial testing showed that there was far more than a few arrowheads left in the soil.

“When we began to see stains in the soil associated with fire hearths, storage pits, and post molds, we knew the site was going to be very interesting,” Gage said.

In their excavations, the university team found that this Trussville site had been occupied repeatedly since the Early Archaic period, around 8,000 years ago, up to the present day. Those uses had ranged from temporary camps along migration routes to long-term homes with buildings near the riverbank.

“This site represents a series of occupations that are relatively small,” Gage said. “What we are seeing is the daily life of the standard person living at that time.”

Gage and fellow archaeologist Joel Watkins said they have found projectile weapons, tools, toys, jewelry and pottery remnants at the site. Some of the weapons date before the invention of the bow and arrow, when the natives of Trussville would have used spears to hunt.

“We can tell all of this, not just by looking at the artifacts left behind, but by where and how they were left. That information is one of the reasons that we try so hard to make sure people understand how important it is to preserve archaeological sites and not just dig them up without considering how much information they are destroying in the process,” Gage said.

Arrowheads are frequent finds not just in Trussville, but at archaeological sites around the region. However, Watkins and Gage said that not every sharpened, triangular stone was the point of a weapon. People sometimes find scraping tools and stone debris from carving other objects and misidentify them as arrow or spear heads. Gage said a microscopic analysis can reveal a stone’s purpose by showing the materials that touched it.

In one interesting discovery, the archaeological team found the remains of an oven with a cooked deer haunch still inside.

“Which brings up the question – why was it still there?” Watkins said.

Gage said it’s likely something unusual caused people to quickly abandon the site, leaving their cooked food behind, but there’s no way to tell what the cause was.

The archaeological site can answer some questions, but not others. Gage said they don’t know what type of homes the early inhabitants of Trussville built, or what would prompt them to leave. They also don’t know how those early groups would identify themselves or connect to historically recognized tribes, as many oral stories of these people have been lost.

Some may be connected to the Creek tribe, which Gage said are the earliest documented Trussville residents. 

However, what the University of Alabama team can tell is that the early people of Trussville were all about trade. Some of them were coming to Trussville as a new frontier, bringing knowledge and materials from the places they left behind. Once they settled, those connections stayed strong. The types of stone and materials found at the site can be traced to locations around the state and even further westward. The residents of Trussville were a small part of a larger trade network of groups across the country.

“People aren’t isolated,” Gage said. “This site shows that interaction.”

“It was an amazing trade network that was occurring,” Watkins said.

Some of those trade partners were more like neighbors. Gage said archaeological sites have been uncovered around Trussville that show similar patterns of habitation. One Watkins mentioned at the Trussville Historical Society meeting was an occupation on the site of the Trussville Walmart at the Colonial Promenade.

Now that the University of Alabama has finished its historical analysis, Gage said there has been interest in creating a display of the artifacts at Hewitt-Trussville Stadium to remind Husky fans about the “rich cultural heritage” that surrounds them.

“People have been living in Trussville for at least 12,000 years. That’s enough time for people to have lived and walked over just about every corner of the City. They left behind trash and other evidence of their existence that tells us a lot about who they were and what they were doing,” Gage said. “If we can carefully examine some of those archaeological sites, features, and artifacts we can learn an incredible amount about Alabama’s history and prehistory.”