Golf, Transportation, & The Archaic Period: Archaeology for the Bobby Jones Expressway Extension Project

Bobby Jones was a golfer of international renown who hailed from Augusta, Georgia. U. S. Interstate Highway 520, which encircles Augusta, was named in his honor. An extension of this transportation artery will cross a section of the Savannah River floodplain that has a long history of human occupation. This report documents various aspects of the lifeways of the Indians who lived at this location long before golf and interstate highways were invented. More than eighty archeological sites have been identified in the general project vicinity through Cultural Resource Management mandated survey since the 1970s. These sites contain evidence of human occupation in the region dating back more than 10,000 years. This project serves to chronicle the human presence at three of these locations. While enlightening, only part of the history is contained within these three sites. Hopefully, our continued research in the region will soon dwarf the contributions of this project, and, undoubtedly, some of our interpretations will be require revision. But, such is the way that scientific knowledge progresses. The data presented herein, however, should remain useful for many decades, just as the works of such nineteenth century researchers as C.C. Jones and Roland Steiner continue to prove useful. During the summer of 1991, an extensive data recovery project was conducted by Southeastern Archeological Services, Inc., on three sites in the Savannah River floodplain near Augusta (Figure 1-1). All three sites are located in Richmond County, Georgia. This report details the results of these investigations. This work was conducted under contract (Project #F-117-1 [12]) with the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) in an attempt to mitigate impact from the construction of a 300 ft wide, 4.9-mile-long extension of the Bobby Jones Expressway (Interstate Highway 520) running from the current southern terminus of the highway at New Savannah Road to Sand Bar Ferry Road. This route is a slightly modified version of Alternate C as shown in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) prepared for the project (U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration and the Georgia Department of Transportation (USDOT & GDOT 1985). The three sites under investigation, 9Rl34, 9RI86, and 9RI178, were considered to contain potentially significant cultural resources that could contribute to our knowledge of prehistory. This project was conducted in compliance with the broad mandate of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. The known information, prior to our study, varied considerably from site to site.