information:filtering, structural:expansion, structural:summarization
Origins

Anthropologists and historians have two main theories of Cherokee origins. One is that the Cherokee, an Iroquoian-speaking people, are relative latecomers to Southern Appalachia, who may have migrated in late prehistoric times from northern areas around the Great Lakes. This has been the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee nations and other Iroquoian-speaking peoples. Another theory is that the Cherokee had been in the Southeast for thousands of years and that proto-Iroquoian developed here. Other Iroquoian-speaking tribes in the Southeast have been the Tuscarora people of the Carolinas, and the Meherrin and Nottaway of Virginia.

James Mooney in the late 19th century recorded conversations with elders who recounted an oral tradition of the Cherokee people migrating south from the Great Lakes region in ancient times. They occupied territories where earthwork platform mounds were built by peoples during the earlier Woodland and Mississippian culture periods.

For example, the people of the Connestee culture period are believed to be ancestors of the historic Cherokee and occupied what is now Western North Carolina in the Middle Woodland period, circa 200 to 600 CE. They are believed to have built what is called the Biltmore Mound, found in 1984 south of the Swannanoa River on the Biltmore Estate, which has numerous Native American sites.

Other ancestors of the Cherokee are considered to be part of the later Pisgah phase of South Appalachian Mississippian culture, a regional variation of the Mississippian culture that arose circa 1000 and lasted to 1500 CE. There is a consensus among most specialists in Southeast archeology and anthropology about these dates. But Finger says that ancestors of the Cherokee people lived in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee for a far longer period of time. Additional mounds were built by peoples during this cultural phase. Typically in this region, towns had a single platform mound and served as a political center for smaller villages.