Pre-1700s | Kentucky Timeline
1000, was the Woodland Period which included the Adena and Hopewell cultures , a people who built mounds for complex burial and ceremonial rituals. The Adena lived in a variety of locations, including: Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and parts of Pennsylvania and New York. Although the first use of coal in Kentucky is unknown, Hopi People, living in what is now Arizona, are known to have used coal to bake pottery made from clay more than 1,000 years ago.
1540, the earliest known contact with Europeans occurred when a party of Cherokee warriors successfully defended their northwestern border against the advances of Hernando DeSoto and his Spanish soldiers. They forced the Spanish to retreat from Kentucky to the north side of the Ohio River at present-day Fort Massac, Illinois.
The 1557 Portuguese narrative of DeSoto’s expedition claims the word Cherokee comes from the written as chalaque. It is derived from the Choctaw word, choluk, which means cave. Mohawk call the Cherokee oyata’ge’ronoñ, which means people who live in caves or in the cave country. In Catawba, the Cherokee are called mañterañ, which translates as the people who come out of the ground. Kentucky is a land of caves and home to the longest cave in the world.