Diggin' in the dirt

Posted: Wednesday, June 15, 2005

To a lot of people, "archaeologist" conjures up an image of Indiana Jones, cracking a whip with one arm and cradling an armful of blonde with the other.


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The work of archaeology is noticeably less glamorous for the professionals at Southeastern Archeological Services, an Athens company that does the authentic stuff, however.

Southeastern's Ron Schoettmer and Gail Tomczak were doing real archaeology Monday on a ridge above Athens-Clarke County's wastewater treatment plant on Will Hunter Road.

As the ripe aromas of the treatment plant wafted up from below, Schoettmer used a sharpened shovel to dig out earth from a 2-meter-square pit, sending each shovelful of dirt arcing into a wooden frame with a screen bottom, suspended beneath a wooden tripod.

Tomczak shook and worked the moist red dirt through the quarter-inch wire mesh, looking for bits and pieces of pottery, hand-worked flint, quartz or other "artifacts" that would give them clues about who may have lived on this patch of land hundreds of years ago.

By 1 p.m., they'd gathered only a handful of artifacts, mainly tiny bits of broken pottery no bigger than the tip of a little finger. But it would probably be all they needed to finish work on the site, said Tom Gresham, one of the owners and founders of the 23-year-old company.

Their work was the second part of a process that began in April, when Schoettmer used his shovel to dig a series of holes in a grid across the site, which will soon become part of an expansion of the wastewater treatment plant.

They came back to do a more thorough sifting at the place Schoettmer decided would be most likely to yield more artifacts, and though the more thorough search found little, it was enough for experienced eyes like Schoettmer's. Gresham says there's not a better field archaeologist in Georgia, with an uncanny ability to pick exactly the right place to dig.

Designs on the pottery fragments Schoettmer and Gresham found told them the artifacts probably date from the "Lamar" period 500 to 800 years ago, a period when Indians lived in places along the Oconee Rivers.

The site likely won't be considered officially "significant," said Gresham.

In this context, significant is a legal term that's at the heart of most of Southeastern Archeological Services' work, called "contract archaeology," or sometimes in government language, "cultural resource management," Gresham explained.

It's a kind of archaeology born about 40 years ago when Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, Gresham said.

The law aims to ensure that federal money doesn't help destroy valuable archaeological sites and other "cultural resources" during construction projects. Since federal money is involved in the expansion of the wastewater plant, the law comes into play, so the engineering company developing plans for the city, Jordan Jones & Goulding, hired Southeastern Archeological to dig around the site to see what was there.

If Southeastern archaeologists think important new knowledge can come from a site, they recommend that it be classified as "significant," meaning it holds enough buried evidence that scientists could learn new things about how people lived in the past.

"The theory is that a site is significant because of information," Gresham said. The determination is ultimately made by the lead federal agency involved, but almost always, the agency follows the archaeologists' recommendation, he said.

Information means not just the broken pottery bits and other artifacts, but the context they are found in - placement and features such as a change in the soil in a defined area that might indicate a burial, a living space or a hearth, he said.

The wastewater site didn't promise to reveal much new knowledge or rise to the level of "significant."

It's actually fairly typical of the 40 or so digs a year done by the company, one of only six or seven archaeology companies in the state. The company's shelves hold about 900 reports from projects it has completed in Georgia and other Southeastern states since it was founded, Gresham said.

Monira Al-Haroun Silk/Staff

 Tomczak holds up a piece of "Lamar" period pottery (circa A.D.1300-1500) she found at the site.

Many people start companies to be their own bosses, but that was secondary with Southeastern Archeological, said Gresham and Chad Braley, who founded the company with a third archaeologist, Dean Wood, in 1982. They just wanted to continue doing the kind of work they love, Gresham said.

The idea came as the three sat around breakfast at Shoney's one day, Braley said. They were working as archaeologists for another company at that time, but that company was struggling, and eventually went out of business.

"It just seemed like a very viable way to stay where we were and do archaeology," said Graham, who, like Braley, is 52.

When they found out how little it would cost to set up business, it made even more sense. Wood had an old Jeep, Braley an Apple computer.

That and a few shovels was about all they needed, Gresham said.

While the work in Athens mainly showed Athens-Clarke County won't be destroying irreplaceable cultural history when it expands the sewage plant, sometimes Southeastern's archaeologists find sites that go way beyond "significant," most recently in a lengthy excavation in Savannah.

There, the company was hired by the Georgia Ports Authority to do some exploratory digging on a 25-acre site full of tall old oaks that the authority wanted to use for another port expansion, about four miles from downtown Savannah.

It turned out to be the kind of site archaeologists dream about finding.

The place had once been a trading post and plantation owned by Mary Musgrove, one of Georgia's most important historic figures.

Half-white, half Creek, Musgrove was an interpreter and a kind of liaison between James Oglethorpe and the Creek chief Tomochichi when the English colonists founded Savannah in 1733.

Excavation began in earnest in 2002, and the site produced tens of thousands of artifacts, including about 30,000 from one 15-foot-square hole that may have been a cellar for the trading post.

Of all the artifacts the company's archaeologists have unearthed, Mary Musgrove's cellar has to be at the top, Gresham said.

"The contents date from about 1740, and included bottles, the metal portions of a few guns and the remains of about 70 to 80 vessels such as pots.

"She was such an important person. It's one of the very earliest Anglo sites you could have in Georgia, and it was so intact. It was sort of haunting to see those bottles still there where somebody left them several hundred years ago," he said.

When construction finally begins on the port expansion, Southeastern archaeologists will be back to keep a sharp eye out on the heavy equipment. With luck, the big shovels will reveal more work for the archaeologists' small shovels.

"We suspect there's a cemetery out there somewhere," Braley said.

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