The Ocmulgee Archaeological Society (OAS) is working to finalize a meeting place for next year since we have to move from Ocmulgee National Monument (ONM), where we have been meeting since our re-establishment in 2003. The National Park Service’s budgetary restraints have made it impossible to have a ranger on duty after hours next year. This connection between ONM and SGA goes back to the 1930s, when the founding members of what became the SGA organized in Macon, acquired the property, and donated it to the government for a national monument. The relationship continued in the 1950s and 1960s when the Macon Archaeological Society, and in the 1980s when the Middle Georgia Archaeological Society, met at Ocmulgee. As of 2007, the SGA will have a Macon- based society, but no presence at the Macon Plateau site. Perhaps we will return in the future. It looks at this point as though a lecture room in the Willett Science Center at Mercer University will be the new venue. Special thanks go to physics professor Matt Marone, an OAS member, for working on this for us.
Dr. Marone is also working with two students to complete the construction of a magnetometer for use by the OAS in 2007 in locating a number of Confederate cannon tubes that may have been buried in the spring of 1865 by Union General James H. Wilson’s cavalry, possibly on or near ONM property. Dr. Richard Iobst, author of Civil War Macon, is the originator of this project, and others who have volunteered to help include the local United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans camps. Another related project the OAS is beginning to research is the original location of Camp Oglethorpe, an antebellum fairgrounds and militia parade field that was converted to a Union officer POW camp. It appears to be on railroad property now owned by Norfolk-Southern.
The OAS will have a Christmas party at the home of Stephen and Donna Hammack, on a date yet to be decided, in lieu of its regular meeting. Artifact ID Days are planned in Vienna (Dooly County) at the City Park in conjunction with the Vienna Historic Preservation Society on December 2, from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m., and in Thomaston at the Archives building (the old library) in conjunction with the Upson County Historical Society on December 9 from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. Special thanks go to John Whatley for agreeing to travel from Augusta for both of these events.
Additionally, incoming 2007 President David Mincey’s Bibb County Clovis point and Bibb County Dalton point were recently re-recorded by Stephen Hammack for a correction to the SGA Paleoindian Recordation Project (see photo above).
Posted online on Friday, December 1st, 2006