Beau Carroll

Partial Transcript: My name is Beau Carroll. I'm the archaeological technician for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. I grew up here my whole life. I've never lived anywhere else.

Partial Transcript: When I was in school, I kind of—I know I liked to be outside and I liked physical work, and I was interested in history. Once I started working in history, I realized that the majority of my time would have been spent inside in a library, and all of the things that I was reading—no Cherokee—there were no Cherokee authors. It was always, I guess, the conqueror, and I felt the Cherokees didn't have a voice within academia, and I took that as a good opportunity for—well, and I took a field school—an archaeological field school, and I realized I could do the history and I could make my own determinations based off of evidence and I could be outside and do physical work. I think that's what drew me toward archaeology, yeah.

Partial Transcript: I've worked a lot of places. I think the thing that stands out the most would be, I would—I was a field supervisor for a field school for a couple years and it was always different college students or high school students that I worked with, and they're always from—most of them were from Illinois, and a lot of them had never seen a Native American, much less interacted with one. So I got to—they're future—future archaeologists, and I got to give them my take on the importance of what they were finding. I wanted to stress to them that the people that they're studying are still there, and be respectful, and I felt that was a good opportunity for me to do that and maybe change a couple of people's minds. Maybe this couple of people will change some more minds. I think a lot of archaeologists would benefit from something like that. Oh, and then I've been—I was on Story of God with Morgan Freeman—took him to a cave and opened up a mound site in Nashville. That was pretty interesting. And just—every time I find something, it's almost like the first time. I would think that's what gold prospectors feel like when they find gold, and it just kind of fuels it—fuels my interest and gets me going again, and when I'm looking, I usually find something, so I'm always pretty interested in the work that I'm doing.

Partial Transcript: Just—yeah. I think one thing that stood out was, I didn't realize how many Cherokees there actually were. I thought they were a little bit here, a little bit there, but if it's flat and there's water, then more than likely, they lived there for thousands of years. And once I started doing archaeology—you know—you come across their houses and their fire pits, and I got to find out what they were eating—kind of how they prepared it, and it's different in different regions because the environment changes, but they were all one people, and I like to pick up on the subtle differences—at like pottery, they'll be subtle differences in regions of pottery. That interested me. The way they built houses and where they built them—that interests me a lot.

Partial Transcript: Oh, sorry. So waterways—what waterways meant to the Cherokee, traditionally and today—I'm sure there was more emphasis on water, just like there was more—I guess more traditional knowledge existed then—so they probably used water more, but even today, I think the way Cherokees use water is the same way they were using it since—I don't know how long—since the beginning of time. You know, you use to cleanse. Every traditional thing that I participate in, always involves water first. You use it for contamination, to cleanse yourself, sort of like a baptism, you know, you go—I remember waking up when I was young and going right at sun up, and I mean we did that a lot, but not as much as I'm sure traditionally people did. They probably got up every day regardless of the weather—how cold it was outside, you know, y'all went to the water as a family and washed off. Now we use it kind of to get rid of the contamination, but I don't think we do it as much as we should or as much as they did, but it does play an important role in traditions because without that moving water, you're not clean enough to participate with everybody else, and it's the same—well, I can't speak for other people, but I would assume it's the same for everyone that's participating.

Partial Transcript: Traditional Cherokees would situate their settlements—it seems to me that it had to be near water. So you would have a big—a big river and then you would have a small stream and they usually interconnected. If you can find one of them and it's flat, more than likely, somebody lived there at one point. They would fish in the big river, wash their clothes, and they would drink out of the small spring. I also found that interesting in studying settlement patterns because almost every settlement pattern ends up in one of those Vs with the spring and the river meeting, but then I guess—practically you wouldn't want to carry water as—you wouldn't want to carry as far—you know, short distance to get it, short distance to bathe and they liked to use rivers with steep banks as kind of like a natural wall or a protection—I've seen that a lot too.
David Weintraub
As like flood protection?
Beau Carroll
Like enemy protection. They were strategic in placing—so you had a good view of if somebody was coming and it kind of always started in pinch points. A lot of mound sites are beside rivers and between streams.

Partial Transcript: Funny story—I used to take my kids—I'd tell them I take them swimming—to the river to swim if they would pick up big flat rocks that I could use for a walkway and load my truck up, so that was always the deal. I would take them swimming, but they had to load rocks in my truck, and that was the same for me. I'm assuming it would be a family thing—you know—you'd get out and get in the water, you stack some rocks up from one end of the river to the other, in a V, and kind of have the middle open. Sometimes they would have nets; sometimes they'd have a basket, but you would get up at the other end, the big part of the V and kind of beat—make noise—scare the fish, so the fish would hit that V and funnel in and either go in a net or a basket. You know, there's other ways. They would find kind of a deep hole and fill it with walnut husks and it does something to the fish where it shocks them, but they don't die, so they kind of float to the top and then you either scoop them up with a net or put them in a basket. It's a lot faster than getting a cane—piece of cane and tying the line on the end of it and sitting there all day. I'm sure they did it that way too.

Partial Transcript: I'm not—I know that there is a fish weir in Sylva. There's a tomato field on one side and kind of a house on the other side. That's the only one that I know about. I'm sure there was a village there, but I'm not aware of any significance that people would make a pilgrimage to see it, but I guess just it being the only weir that's still around that you can see, that's probably why they stopped to see it. You can see them sometimes, kind of just riding down the road looking at river, you can see where they had started making one or had broke down, but yeah. The one you're talking about is a pretty good one.
David Weintraub
And she said there was an Indian village across the way.
Beau Carroll
Yeah at one time there would have been an Indian village, there's a spring that comes down right up the road from there and that big river, and it's pretty flat—yeah—I'd say there was a settlement there. I haven't heard anybody doing any work there, though.

Partial Transcript: The connections between stewardship for the Cherokee—I think that Cherokees felt like everything in the environment is vital, so originally Cherokees were put here after plants and after animals, so their only job is to take care of that stuff. They're kind of—they weren't the first ones here, so they're kind of—not an afterthought—but something that's left other. So their job was to take care of the things still there before them, which would be waterways, land and trees, and animals and plants. So they knew that—they could use that—use their natural resources to their advantage, but if they overused it or did something to pollute it or hurt it, that—that resource wouldn't be there anymore, and that was survival. I mean, you wouldn't be able to survive without that, and I think they understood that concept. Today, I don't want to say we're a little bit—obviously, it's decreased, and you can't stop progress, I guess, but over the years, I've realized that the Oconaluftee River, the Soco, all these rivers where I grew up, they're the cleanest rivers I have ever seen compared to surrounding areas. I've always felt—I felt that they were important. I mean, you drink water to survive, and yeah, Cherokees understood that.

Partial Transcript: Transportation though—I think that native American people in general moved around a lot more than kind of archaeologists or historians think they did. You know, I find certain types of rocks or shells that you find in Louisiana, I'll find them here, so they had to get here somehow. They did a lot of trading, but I think they just went everywhere, so a good way to get from one place to another would be to ride in a canoe. It would be the fastest. I don't know about carrying it back, but I'm sure you could trade it for something. So, yeah, they used rivers for transportation a lot. I think the further—the further west you get, the bigger the rivers get. They probably emphasized that more.

Partial Transcript: Okay. So around 19—the mid-seventies, I think, Tennessee Valley Authority wanted to flood—they actually did flood—but they were in the process of flooding the Little Tennessee for Tellico Lake. My great grandpa Ammoneta Sequouyah, he was a doctor, and I think he realized the place they were wanting to flood was a sacred town at one time, but he also said that there was only a certain type of medicine that grew in the area they're wanting to flood and you couldn't find anywhere else in the world, and he utilized that medicine for a lot of things and he said that by them flooding that place and him not being able to collect the medicine, that a lot of cures that he knew how to do would go away. I was searching something on the internet and just ran across the kind of minutes on the court case. I read a little bit about it but it sounded like he was saying that they were infringing on his constitutional rights. Said something about religious beliefs, but in the end TVA won that court case and they ended up flooding that lake and making Tellico lake.
David Weintraub
Do you know if they were able to find another place where the herbs grew?
Beau Carroll
No—I'm not a sure if they did find another place where those plant grew. If anybody knew, it would have been him, and he was pretty adamant on saying that's the only place you could find. I mean, there might have been another type of plant that was the same, but it wasn't the exact one that he needed, and I think he did a lot of—Cherokee doctors do a lot on how the plant—how they feel about the plant, not what the plant is. No, there's certain ways you could test the plant to see if it's going to work or not. The plant ten feet away from the other plant might not work for what you're wanting to do. You kind of feel it out, so he felt that that was the only place you could find it, more than likely that was the only place you could find it.

Partial Transcript: Near water, for medicinal uses—a lot of plants grow just beside the water that you could use. No, there's certain things you can do to test which involves water, but, you know, I can't get into the specifics, but they would find medicine and test it the in the water and to see if it would work, and it normally told you, you know, if it would be right for the person you were wanting to give it to. I mean they made—they find dyes for baskets beside the river, the same plant, which grows abundant beside the river today, they used for—kind of like penicillin I guess, used it for infections, sore throats. Just that one type of plant's kind of a cure all.
David Weintraub
Do you know what the name of it was?
Beau Carroll
Yellow root goldenseal. I remember when I had strep throat when I was young, and I don't know why they didn't take me to the hospital, but instead they made me some medicine; some yellow root, and it was a big gallon jug and I had to drink all of it, and it tasted awful. Awful tasting stuff, and I remember the next time my throat was sore, I didn't mention it. So I didn't have to drink that medicine. And today—and to this day, I still don't know why they didn't take me to the doctor, but I mean—I guess it worked. I'm still here.
David Weintraub
Probably scares the colds away.
Beau Carroll
Yeah, I still think about that when my throat gets sore.
David Weintraub
I've goldenseal. It's a very potent—very strong, very pungent. I've had the powder. You swallow, so it isn't quite so bad as the liquid.

Partial Transcript: I feel like it's important for Cherokees to remember—just things in the environment, everything in Cherokee tradition is connected. So the water would be connected with the land. In turn, would be connect with the people. would be connected with your religion, would be connected with the way you treat people. You can't lose one and expect the others to be held up. Kind of like playing Jenga. you know—there's only so many blocks you can pull out before the thing falls down. And it goes in a circle, so the environment is important to protect that. I think it's just common sense, but traditionally it's important. Language is very important. I think without most of these things, we're just people. We're not Cherokee anymore, and I think we have been fighting that for a really long time—ever since contact we have been fighting to keep—I guess—to keep who we were as Cherokees. But yeah, I'm afraid that if we lose one of those, if we don't take care of the environment, we can't speak Cherokee anymore, it kind of just takes your whole—the way you view life and the way you treat other people—kind of takes it away. I'm not saying there's—I'm not saying there's not good people, but the way traditional Cherokee people lived, you were a good person. You know—you didn't have to have a lawyers or policeman. If you had a door, you didn't lock it, because it didn't have a lock on it. So it's like—it seems like the more we lose and the more of the outside world we're exposed to kind of corrupts us, I guess. It's kind of sad to say that, but there's been a revitalization, in the past 15 years. A lot more people learning languages. A lot more people practicing traditional—the traditions that Cherokee people were taught that they needed practice. There's more of a revitalization in that too, so we're sit still fighting it.

Partial Transcript: This archeological site over here that I'm work on, back in the 90's, I think it was, originally, they wanted to put the casino in this parking lot. It used to be a cornfield. They had an archaeologist come out and put some tests ditches in—probably six foot wide trenches. They found that there was a lot more archaeology than they had expected, and then the tribe was tied up in wanting the casino to be built, so we were kind of tight with money, and I think it cost more than the tribe wanted to spend at the time, so they moved the location and made it a parking lot. Now that the casino is growing and they're needing more room, they decided to go ahead and build out towards this archeological site. Well, that means I have to hire other archeologists to come out and determine—you know—how much is going to be destroyed kind of—if there are graves, that we leave them in place and not disturb them, so the architects come out and meet with the archaeologists. They work up a plan for the culturally sensitive things to be left undisturbed and they kind of work around the archeologist's plan. So they're wanting to put retail shops here, so right now we are in the end stages of—I think— the first archaeological phase. Right now they're getting—I guess the last little bit that's left. They're collecting it, recording it, photographing it, cataloging it, and they house it for us in where their suppository is for sometime in the future when we get a suppository, then we can have all of this stuff that we've been collecting moved here so any Cherokee that wants to study it in the future knows it's just right down the road.
David Weintraub
What are they finding?
Beau Carroll
They found—the part I'm working on is 5-7,000 years, so it's a middle archaic area. The further west you get—of the parking lot—the kind of later it gets. Right now I think they're working on a middle woodland component. I can't remember the year on that. They found soapstone bowls, which are pretty amazing because to have a bowl made out of a rock is—I mean, it's interesting to me. Pieces of soapstone bowls, they found lots of pottery, some pipes, and a lot of posts. I think I was on feature 3,000, so that was—there's been3,000 flags put down for potential interest before I started, so that's a lot. It was a densely occupied area for a long time. So I think when they're done here, they're probably going to move further south in the parking lot—seems like they would want to do it all at one time and then they could build whatever they want to here. Yeah, that's what I have been working on.
David Weintraub
So are they going to be moving everything or is everything going to remain in the ground?
Beau Carroll
The things that the Cherokees don't want moved, if there is a potential grave, it won't be moved. Everything else, you know—everything that you find as an archaeologist, if you find whole things, like whole pots, more than likely it came out of somebody's grave. Basically I'm just a glorified trash person. I just find people's trash and seem really interested in it. I always think in my head, that they Cherokees that made this, if they could see me, how hilarious it would be that I'm so interested in the trash that they just dropped on the ground and kicked it under something. Like I just—I think they would find it hilarious that I'm doing that, yeah.