Learn about Georgia's archaeology! Help save Georgia's fast-disappearing past! Tour the ArchaeoBus!
Join the SGA, and meet avocational and professional archaeologists, and the interested public.
The Society has two meetings each year, in the spring and fall, at locations that rotate around the state. The spring meeting is in conjunction with Archaeology Month, in May. Meetings are open to the public. Check our calendar for the date of the next meeting!
Museums and other institutions store and display artifacts. Curators—the professionals who care for artifact collections in museums and other institutions that preserve artifacts—must be very careful to make sure that artifacts are preserved and not damaged while in their care. Read about many potential agents of deterioration, degradation, and destruction in the full article.
Prior to the 2011 Fort Daniel Frontier Faire in Gwinnett County, several geophysical surveys had been conducted at the site by Dr. Sheldon Skaggs of Georgia Southern University, the combined results of which suggested the presence of features within the footprint of the fort. We have also previously reported that the footprint of the fort’s palisade walls and corner blockhouses, as determined by archaeological investigations, corresponds precisely to the plan for frontier forts sent by President Washington’s Secretary of War, Henry Knox, to the Governor of Georgia in 1794.
Mark your calendar: the SGA’s Spring Meeting will be held on Saturday May 19th, as part of 2012 Archaeology Month celebrations. This year’s Archaeology Month theme is Commemorating the Bicentennial of the War of 1812. We will meet at Georgia Gwinnett College, which is co-sponsoring the meeting. In addition, the group will tour Fort Daniel, which dates to the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Do you geotag your digital photographs? North Carolina archivists have determined the geographic location of myriad photographs and other historical materials that illuminate the history of the Blue Ridge Parkway, then put scans of those materials online for researchers to browse. Read more about Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina in the full story.
The naval stores industry was important to Georgia’s economy for generations. Naval stores are made from the sap of pine trees. This industry was concentrated in the piney areas of the Coastal Plain. Visit the Million Pines Rest Area north of Soperton and learn about harvesting pine sap.
Plan an event anywhere in the state for Archaeology Month in spring 2012! This story links to a form you can download and fill out to get your event listed in the SGA’s Calendar of Events brochure, which is distributed around the state, and beyond. Activities of all sorts are encouraged!
SGA Vice-President Tammy Herron and two colleagues, George Wingard and Keith Stephenson, attended the 75th Anniversary Reception on Thursday, December 1, 2011 at Ocmulgee National Monument. In a later ceremony, the SGA received a Certificate of Appreciation for helping to “preserve and protect the ‘Ocmulgee Old Fields’” and for helping to “create Ocmulgee National Monument” in 1936.
The first documented find of gold in Georgia dates to the summer of 1829, according to E. Merton Coulter in Auraria: The story of a Georgia gold-mining town (University of Georgia Press, Athens, originally published in 1956 and released in paperback in 2009, and available online for free). Auraria, in Lumpkin County, was a town that flourished during the rush and is a ghost town today.
Issue number 151 of the SGA’s quarterly newsletter, The Profile, is now available as a downloadable and printable PDF. All stories in The Profile all were originally posted to this website.
Nicholas Wade, in his 2009 book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, argues that behaviors we describe as religious conferred a survival advantage on early humans, and thus were adaptive and favored by natural selection. The benefits he ascribes to religious beliefs and practices include emotions like trust and loyalty, which support cooperation and empathy, improve group cohesion, and improve the survival rate of groups.
Have you ever wondered what it would have been like to travel in North America with an early European adventurer? Read Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s Looking for De Soto: A Search Through the South for the Spaniard’s Trail (published in 1993) and you will learn what it was like to try to trace the route that Hernando De Soto and his entourage took through southeastern North America in 1540. Mrs. Hudson and her husband, then UGA professor Dr. Charles Hudson, set out to retrace and verify the route of the De Soto expedition in 1984.
SGA President Catherine Long summarizes the year’s events for the Society for Georgia Archaeology, and previews upcoming activities in 2012.
Preston Holder was the most productive archaeologist of the Georgia Coast during the Federal Works Progress Administration era (WPA was created in April 1935), and, in fact, the SGA helped fund his salary prior to the WPA. Some artifacts from Holder’s work were displayed at the Visitor’s Center at the entrance to the St. Simons causeway. Kevin Kiernan discusses Holder’s work in the November 2011 issue of the Society for American Archaeology’s Archaeological Record, which is previewed in the full story.
Diaries are one of many primary sources about the past. Primary sources are records from people who had first-hand experience with what is recorded in the materials they have left behind. On this website we have a diary—of Abby the ArchaeoBus. The ArchaeoBus is a major outreach project of the SGA, and billed as Georgia’s mobile archaeology classroom. Using Abby’s diary as an example, consider the strengths and weaknesses of diaries as aids to understanding the past.
…in which Abby the ArchaeoBus attends the Georgia Council for the Social Studies Conference in Athens along with hundreds of teachers, many of whom, she discovered, are quite knowledgeable about Georgia archaeology.
Catch up with the news of the SGA’s Augusta Chapter, the Augusta Archaeological Society, by reading the December issue of the AAS’s newsletter, The Debitage. The issue details activities of the AAS in 2011, and plans for a holiday party on December 8th.
There’s a little-known type of archaeological site called a transportation site. Transportation sites are of many sub-types, including railroads and railroad depots and yards, roads and trails, canals, and wharves and docks. These are archaeological sites but not residential sites. Read more in the full story, which focusses on the Brunswick-Altamaha Canal, which SGA members and guests visited during the tour of archaeological sites near St. Simons Island that was the focus of the SGA’s exciting 2010 Fall Meeting.
The SGA thanks outgoing Early Georgia Editor Tom Pluckhahn for the four years of quality work he’s given the Society.
Many people have encountered one of the editions of James Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life, which was first published in 1977 and is still an insightful volume. Dr. Deetz discusses, among many other things, the importance of chronology and dating to the study of the past. He also argues that small things are extremely important to understanding the past, giving examples of how we may continue behaviors with roots in the past in everyday life today.
The well-attended October 2011 Frontier Faire at Fort Daniel, sponsored by the Gwinnett Archaeological Research Society, a Chapter of the SGA, and the Fort Daniel Foundation, hosted a Trading Post, tours, a candle-maker, both Girl and Boy Scouts, a food area and more. The 2011 Frontier Faire is considered a definite success and will serve as a model for next year’s Faire.
Where was Fort Daniel? This frontier fort was long believed to have been on a ridge-top knoll on Hog Mountain in Gwinnett County. In 2007, the Gwinnett Archaeological Research Society, a Chapter of the SGA, began a research program under the direction of Dr. James D’Angelo to locate physical remains of the fort using two forms of subsurface remote sensing, metal detection and ground penetrating radar. This detailed article reports the happy results of that research.
President Catherine Long details the 2011 Fall Meeting, in Athens. Members and guests of the SGA enjoyed papers in the morning and afternoon of Saturday, 22 October, with the sessions split by a brief Business Meeting and a lunch break. The group reconvened in the evening at the Terrapin Brewery for silent and live fund-raising auctions. Over $1400 was raised for the SGA’s Endowment Fund, after expenses.
See lots of photos of the SGA’s ten tables and the ArchaeoBus at CoastFest 2011, held in October in Brunswick, by checking out the full story. Well over 9000 people attended CoastFest, and hundreds toured the ArchaeoBus and the exhibits under and around the SGA tent. The SGA installation was supported by 18 volunteers, many from the Golden Isles Archaeological Society, and also from Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and the United Kingdom.
The University of Georgia Student Association for Archaeological Sciences recently sponsored a day-long atlatl workshop with Scott Jones, primitive technologist and expert in atlatl manufacture and use. Twelve SAAS members and their faculty advisor, Jared Wood, gathered at Scott’s outdoor classroom at “The Woods” just northeast of Lexington, and listened to Scott’s exciting lecture, then practiced primitive skills, and had great fun taking aim at cardboard quarry. The full story includes many exciting photographs of the outing.
Researchers and the curious can now peruse the titles and authors of all articles published in Early Georgia since SGA began publishing the journal in 1950. The page with the listing is here.
Frontiers in the Soil is a classic in archaeological literature that should be useful to everyone. Using easy-to-read text by Roy S. Dickens, Jr., and creative color cartoon illustrations by James L. McKinley, Frontiers interprets Georgia’s past with humor in over 100-pages of delightful reading. Click here to download the order form for Frontiers in the Soil.
Georgia’s Mobile Archaeology Classroom—the ArchaeoBus—provides hands-on and minds-on activities to enthuse your students about learning. Archaeology is a great tool for turning on the minds of students, as well as a great motivational tool. More important, it is a discipline capable of instruction in a wide variety of skills. Archaeology is a holistic academic and intellectual approach that involves all subject areas, social skills, and conceptual skills. Georgia’s Mobile Archaeology Classroom offers the opportunity for students and teachers to leave the traditional four-walled classroom and use a new approach to learn state standards!
The complete archive of online news on various topics in archaeology is here, listed in reverse order of publication on this website. If, instead, you are interested in an archive of notices about the business of the Society (e.g., preparations for meetings), click here.
Welcome to the website of the Society for Georgia Archaeology, a non-profit organization whose vision is that all Georgians understand the significance of their archaeological sites so that they will support archaeological preservation, education and research.
The SGA's mission is to unite all persons interested in the archaeology of Georgia and to work actively to preserve, study and interpret Georgia’s historic and prehistoric remains.
The SGA thanks outgoing Early Georgia Editor Tom Pluckhahn for the four years of quality work he’s given the Society.