By OBBM Network Editorial Staff

Derived from an episode of The Buried Archive.

Deep in the 19th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, published in 1879, lies a record that has gone largely unnoticed. It was compiled by James Mooney, a field ethnologist who spent years living among the eastern band of the Cherokee in the mountains of western North Carolina. The Cherokee elders told Mooney about a people who had been in the region before them, a people they called the Nunnahai, who had managed the chestnut trees in a way that was unfamiliar to the Cherokee.

The Chestnut Connection

The chestnut material appears across multiple sessions with multiple informants, describing a form of coppicing that produced dramatically more nut yield per acre than wild chestnut. This practice, known as coppice chestnut, also produced straighter poles useful for construction. The elders described the chestnuts on the western face of the Smokies and along certain ridges in what is now Graham County and Swain County, North Carolina, as having been worked systematically.

As James Mooney noted, the consistency of the elders’ descriptions was remarkable, given that they had no opportunity to coordinate their stories. The chestnut management the elders described was far older than the arrival of European settlers, with physical evidence of multi-generational tending and patterns that did not match natural distribution.

The Ridgeline Clearing and Stone Structures

The Cherokee elders also described the high balds, the treeless summits that occur at intervals along the Smoky Mountain ridgeline, as having been cleared by the ones who came before. This is a well-documented scientific mystery, with no entirely satisfactory natural explanation for why certain summits are treeless while others at similar elevation with similar soil and weather conditions support dense spruce-fir forest.

Scattered across the mountain landscape of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia, are stone structures that do not fit comfortably into any known archaeological category. These structures include standing stones arranged in alignments corresponding to astronomical events and dry-laid stone walls enclosing areas that serve no obvious colonial purpose.

The Tartaria Hypothesis

The Tartaria Hypothesis claims that the official periodization of human activity in the pre-Columbian Americas is wrong, and that there was a global civilization or network of related civilizations with wide geographic reach, systematically erased from the historical record. The evidence for this erasure is hiding in plain sight, in government ethnographic reports, forestry survey anomalies, and stone structures that nobody official wants to categorize.

As one surveyor noted in 1842, there is a ‘most curious arrangement of stones upon the summit of the ridge that did not appear to be the work of the present native inhabitants.’ This notation exists in the National Archives, but it has never been followed up by any official archaeological investigation.

‘When the old people talked about the ones who came before, Mooney wrote it down. When they described structures in the mountains they had not built, Mooney wrote it down. When they spoke about cleared ridgelines and chestnut orchards predating their own arrival by many lifetimes, Mooney wrote it down.’

Closing Synthesis

The discovery of the chestnut management and stone structures challenges the standard narrative of pre-Columbian North America. It raises questions about the official history of the continent and the people who lived there before the arrival of European settlers. The Tartaria Hypothesis offers a possible explanation for the anomalies found in the historical record, but it requires a fundamentally different framework for understanding the past.

The full episode of The Buried Archive is available on OBBM Network TV.