right|thumb|250px|Tuskegee ("Toskegee") and Fort Loudoun, as they appeared on Henry Timberlake's "Draught of the Cherokee Country"
Tuskegee (also spelled Toskegee, Taskigi, and similar variations) was an Overhill Cherokee town located along the lower Little Tennessee River in what is now Monroe County, Tennessee, United States. The town developed in the late 1750s alongside Fort Loudoun, and was inhabited until the late 1770s. It was forcibly evacuated and probably burned during the Cherokee–American wars.
Tuskegee is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Sequoyah (Cherokee, c.1770-1843), a craftsman and polymath who independently created the Cherokee syllabary as an effective writing system for his language. He is one of the few people from a pre-literate society known in recorded history for such an achievement.
The Tuskegee town site was investigated by archaeologists in the 1970s, as part of a survey and excavations of known sites prior to inundation of the valley after completion of the Tellico Dam in 1979.
History
Early explorers made several maps and wrote accounts of the Overhill country, but Tuskegee is not mentioned or noted before 1757. However, a map by William G. De Brahm, the engineer who designed the fort, notes a place called "Taskigee old Town" near one of the proposed sites for the fort (the term "old town" often denoted a cleared or previously inhabited area, and this area is known to have been inhabited for thousands of years by indigenous peoples).
Historians generally believe that the Cherokee town of Tuskegee (also spelled Toskegee) developed here following the construction of Fort Loudoun (1756–1757) by the British colony of South Carolina. A map of the area drawn in either 1756 or early 1757 by John Stuart, an officer in Fort Loudoun's garrison, does not note Tuskegee.
In response to a Cherokee attack against the Watauga settlements in the summer of 1776, Colonel William Christian led an invasion force to the Little Tennessee Valley in October of that year. Finding the Overhill towns deserted, Christian burned five, including Tuskegee. This was targeted for retaliation because the Cherokee had killed a settler boy whom they captured during the Watauga attack. He is one of the few people from a pre-literate society known to have independently created an effective writing system. His syllabary inspired the development of 21 other scripts, used in a total of 65 languages across the world.
Archaeological work and findings
right|225px|thumb|Reconstructed Cherokee "summer" house at Fort Loudoun
The Tennessee Division of Archaeology conducted excavations at the Tuskegee site (40MR4, 40MR24 and 40MR64) in the summer of 1976 in anticipation of the completion of Tellico Dam. Since TVA used the soil around the Tuskegee site for fill dirt to raise adjacent Fort Loudoun above lake operating levels, archaeologists were able to examine a relatively large area around the site (approximately 2.5 acres). These excavations found evidence of twelve structures from various periods dating to the Southern Appalachia Mississippian period, and artifacts from as early as the Archaic period, approximately 7500 BC. (The Tuskegee site lies roughly adjacent to Icehouse Bottom, a key Archaic period site).