A Dark Pathway

Book excerpt: "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"--