At their March meeting on the 12th, members and guests of the Greater Atlanta Archaeological Society, a Chapter of the SGA, enjoyed hearing about the Singer-Moye Mississippian-period mound-and-village settlement that some Chapter members had visited in June 2012 from Stefan Brannan, a University of Georgia graduate student who was directing a Field School there. Brannan says that Singer-Moye is “the second largest Mississippian period mound center in Georgia that no one has ever heard of.” Brannan’s research has revealed hitherto unknown and important information about this archaeological site.

Over the last year a great number of claims have been made about Mayans and Georgia archaeology. Many of these claims have focused on sites located on National Forest land. The Track Rock Gap rock art and stone landscape sites on the Chattahoochee National Forest were created by Creek and Cherokee people beginning more than 1000 years ago and continuing into the 1800s. There is no archeological evidence of any link to Mayan people or culture at this site. Stone landscape sites occur throughout the region and are not unusual, but they should be respected and protected.

Recently, New South Associates was contracted by the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) to recover, analyze, and relocate the Avondale Burial Place in southern Bibb County. Fieldwork discovered 101 individuals. Later analysis, including historical research, indicates the burial ground was most heavily used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, although there are indicators that this location began as a slave cemetery and was subsequently used by African American tenant farmers. View an excellent video about this important project that’s in the full story.

A little known fact about historic cemeteries is that they were often purposefully placed on land lot lines. This type of land usage seems to have been based on common sense, as land owners established family cemeteries on the edges of their property in places that were least likely to hinder agricultural activities. Several examples from Middle Georgia are discussed, although placing cemeteries on the furthest edges of property lines was common across the Southeast, and quite possibly across the nation.

Recently, SGA member Tom Gresham found an 1875 article in the Oglethorpe Echo in which the newspaper’s editor and publisher, T. Larry Gantt, discussed an overnight fishing adventure he made with friends along the Oconee River. As Tom comments, “Fortunately, little of the article discusses fishing, and most describes his ten-mile buggy ride to and from the river and the archeological sites they found along the river, including the Scull Shoals mounds.” We offer the full text of the article in a format evocative of the original, and Tom’s account of finding the 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.

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.

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.

Boy Scouts from Troop 125 in Holly Springs performed some real life science by helping William Phillips, an Eagle Scout from Troop 11 of Gainesville, in early May 2010. Under the supervision of Dr. Jack Wynn, North Georgia College and State University archaeologist and long-time SGA member, the boys visited a prehistoric site that Mr. Phillips had targeted for testing. The scouts helped precisely measure and mark the locations of the new test holes, then worked in supervised groups, making careful notes as they proceeded. At day’s-end, scouts had recovered dozens of pottery fragments, along with a few groundstone artifacts, and the artifacts all had to be cleaned and categorized. The boys learned that science isn’t always done the way it appears to be in the movies.

The report GPR Survey at Gascoigne Bluff, St. Simmons Island, Georgia presents the findings of the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey conducted during the SGA’s 2010 fall meeting. GPR survey of a portion of Gascoigne Bluff on St. Simons Island was performed on October 16, 2010, and report author Dan Elliott was assisted by SGA members in completing the survey. This project was a joint public outreach and research effort by the LAMAR Institute, the Society for Georgia Archaeology, and the Cassina Garden Club.

Researchers at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah identified two historic-period cemeteries. One had been buried beneath a parking lot for over fifty years; it had thirty-seven graves. A second cemetery was identified from an 1889 map as a “Negro Cemetery,” and had well over three hundred burials. All human remains and artifacts were carefully excavated and respectfully moved to Belmont Cemetery, and the Installation’s Garrison Commander and Chaplain participated in a rededication ceremony in conjunction with African-American History Month in February 2009. Article includes photographs of selected grave goods.

Archaeological crews from the American Museum of Natural History have been excavating on St. Catherines Island for over 30 years. Research this fall focused on the McQueen Shell Ring. Data suggests that the ring was the only substantial Late Archaic presence in this section of St. Catherines Island. (The full story may be slow to load due to a large figure.)

Georgia’s Jekyll Island has an interesting past, detailed here. The Island is owned by the the people of Georgia and managed on their behalf by the Jekyll Island Authority. It’s a natural and cultural treasure most of us don’t know enough about.

The Fish Vault has been famous in Memory Hill Cemetery, Milledgeville’s city cemetery, as the place where poor Mr. Fish, despondent over the loss of his wife, had shut himself into the vault and killed himself while sitting in a rocking chair. Visitors to the vault are routinely told to knock at the door and [...]

Jennifer Salinas and Elizabeth Drolet screening soil during the Back Creek Village shovel test pit survey. This past October, the American Museum of Natural History returned to St. Catherines Island for three weeks of fieldwork, tackling a range of interrelated projects. We monitored on-going construction projects occurring on the island, launched a largescale shovel test [...]

The Edgefield scraper is a diagnostic tool of the Early Archaic period that is geographically distributed throughout much of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida. It is essentially a unifacial hafted tool with a bifacially worked side-notched base that typically co-occurs with side-notched points of the Big Sandy/Bolen/Taylor group (Goodyear et al. 1980), but is [...]

About twenty years ago I heard of a “serpent” that had been constructed out of stone on Dick’s Ridge in northwest Georgia. Last year a local informant, Wade Gilbert, led me to not one but three such stone constructions in the same area. The third and largest that was shown to me is the subject [...]

Georgia Mountains Archaeological Society (GMAS) members hosted “Georgia Archaeology Day at Elachee” on Saturday, May 10, in the large classroom at our sponsor’s Environmental Education facility near Gainesville. There were exhibits on the various projects the club members have been involved in, field and laboratory techniques used by archaeologists, and experimental archaeology exhibits such as [...]

Click to see larger. New South Associates, Inc., recently performed excavations at the Berry Creek site (9MO487) in Monroe County, Georgia, for Georgia Power Company. Many of the ceramics in the artifact assemblage were identified as representative of the Swift Creek culture, and several ground- and chipped-stone tools were recovered. One artifact of note, identified [...]

Many readers of The Profile have no doubt heard of the recent announcement of the pending transfer of ownership of the Singer-Moye mound site from the Columbus Museum to the University of Georgia. Those that have not will likely want to know how this decision came about, while those with some understanding of it will [...]

The OAS continues its mission of educating the public about the archaeology of Middle Georgia, and has had several excellent speakers this winter. In January Sam Lawson, recently returned to our area from south Georgia, gave a talk on the locations of the Creek towns that were along the Upper Ocmulgee from 1686 to 1716. [...]

Initial view of dugout canoe in 1970. In late December 1970, I assisted the Broward County Archaeological Society in the location, recovery, and restoration of an abandoned, twelve and a half foot long, cypress dugout canoe. It became the primary display in the small museum the group maintained for public education. My friend Keith Hunt [...]

The Gwinnett Archaeological Research Society (GARS) has been conducting an archaeological investigation at the traditional site of one of Georgia’s earliest frontier forts, Fort Daniel, in Hog Mountain (Hamilton Mill), Gwinnett County, Georgia. New study of old documents shows that Fort Daniel was not original to the site, but rather constructed in late 1813 to [...]

Many of the archeological phase names currently used for northwest Georgia are directly attributable to the work of Joseph Caldwell in Allatoona Reservoir more than fifty years ago (Caldwell 1950, 1957). While terminology has changed over the years, most of the designations used by Caldwell remain in use today. For instance, the old term “Kellogg [...]

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) has been lucky enough to work on St. Catherines Island, Georgia for the last 30+ years. Since 2006, the museum has focused its attention on the Late Archaic Period (3000-1000 B.C.) on the island—specifically, we have been working on the St. Catherines Island Shell Ring. Shell rings are [...]

The GMAS Archaeology Chapter met on Saturday, July 7, 2007 at the home of Jon Hoekstra, professor at Gainesville College, and resident of Chicopee Mill Village, which is adjacent to Chicopee Woods. Jon hikes in the woods and often ambles along stream beds in the area in search of interesting flora and fauna. One day [...]

It is was once said, “June is the month for weddings”. Not in our field of avocational and vocational interest. June is the first full month when schools of all kinds release students of anthropology and archaeology, along with their professors, to “get down to earth” in archaeological pursuits. And sometimes, they allow volunteers to [...]

In September 2006, Leake Site Principal Investigators Scot Keith and Dean Wood took a trip to Indiana in order to conduct research into the Mann site, a Middle Woodland Hopewell site located in southwestern Indiana. This site is notable due to the presence (and abundance) of Swift Creek complicated stamped pottery, as well as sand [...]

Screening at Callaway Gardens Site 9Hs157. Southern Research, Historic Preservation Consultants, Inc., and the Ida Cason Callaway Foundation held an archaeology demonstration dig in conjunction with the Summer Meeting of the American Council of Engineer Companies/Georgia on June 16th. The ACEC met this year at the Southern Pines Conference Center at Callaway Gardens in Pine [...]

Meta-slate axe from the Hardin Bridge site. Research of the Hardin Bridge Site (9BR34) in Bartow County site is ongoing at New South Associates. Laboratory analysis has shown that the Hardin Bridge site represents a Late Archaic through early Middle Woodland timeframe based on lithic and pottery specimens. To date, the majority of hafted bifaces [...]

The Muskogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma and the member tribes of the Southeastern Muskogee (Creek) Confederacy are continuing their ongoing research projects in 2007, which will provide archaeologists and historians a more complete understanding of the Southeast’s Indigenous Peoples. For decades, the Creeks have been frustrated because many official documents, historical markers and publications contained [...]

Southern Research, Historic Preservation Consultants, Inc. has conducted historical research and field survey of a tract in Fort Gaines along the Chattahoochee River. Our research included a search of Georgia’s Historic Preservation Division’s National Register of Historic Places files, the Georgia Archaeological Site Files, The Georgia Department of Archives and History’s Virtual Archives, and the [...]

Major technological and cultural innovations have the potential to influence technology and culture beyond the immediate realm of the innovation itself. While the widespread adoption of fired clay ceramics in the terminal Archaic/Early Woodland era is directly relevant to food preparation, the transition from indirect heating (stone-boiling) to direct heating in pots represents a dynamic [...]

Overview looking south of excavations at L1 and L2. The Gwinnett Archaeological Research Society (GARS) continues to work with the Gwinnett Historical Society (GHS) investigating areas of archaeological interest on the 20-acre Winn House tract in Dacula. Having completed excavation of an outbuilding location associated with the historic Elisha Winn house, where the public was [...]

Transfer of the St. Catherines Island Foundation and Edward John Noble Foundation Collection of archaeological material to Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta was begun early in 2004. This very large, high quality archaeological collection was amassed during 30 years of island investigation led by Dr. David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of [...]

Prominently displayed on the office wall of the Muskogee (Creek) Tribe’s Chief Justice, Patrick Moore, is a tattered old flag. At first glance, one might assume it was a Civil War ancestor’s regimental banner. The Okmulgee, Oklahoma attorney, though, will be quick to tell you that it is a 200-year-old battle ensign of the Creek [...]

Introduction The current owner of a 700-acre ranch on Pigeon Mountain, Walker County, bought the property in 1948 from a Euro- American family that owned it since the late 1830s. This family had a tradition that there were already stone piles on the land when their ancestors first took possession of it. Taken at face [...]

On May 5, 2005, the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) co-sponsored Archaeology Day at the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site in Plains. Timed to coincide with Georgia’s Archaeology Month, this event turned out to be highly successful and richly rewarding for the both the sponsors and participants. The event was geared for groups of second [...]