Roach Family Cemetery Delineation Project

In 2018, Mr. Hal Roach Jr. contacted the Georgia Southern University Department of Sociology and Anthropology Archaeology program to conduct a survey of a historical cemetery located in Bulloch County, Georgia. Mr. Roach had purchased the 100-acre piece of property that once belonged to his relative, Charley A. Roach (b.1828-d.1886), and contains a family cemetery dating to the late-nineteenth century. Located just north of GA Highway 46 near the

intersection with Sam Roach Drive, within southeastern Bulloch County, in a wooded area bordered to the south by open pasture and to the north by Lower Black Creek, the cemetery contains four marked burials (see regional map in Appendix C). Three graves include headstones and belong to the Roach family. The fourth is an above-ground box tomb engraved with the initials J.B.B. The goal of the survey was to delineate the extent of the cemetery and identify any additional gravesites using systematic pedestrian survey, create a map of the known and potential gravesites using an electronic transit, record the location of the cemetery using GPS, document the cemetery following the recommended guidelines of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and record the cemetery as an archaeological site in the Georgia Archaeological Site File.

In December of 2018, Scott Clark and Colin Partridge, graduate students in Georgia Southern University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology working under the direction of Dr. Matthew Compton, completed a pedestrian survey of the area surrounding the marked burials. The survey covered an area of 3.55 acres. No additional burials were recorded. This report summarizes the methods and results of the survey, the results of archival research, and provides recommendations for the preservation of the site.

In order to delineate the cemetery, a systematic pedestrian survey was conducted on December 12th and 13th, 2018. Using the marked graves as a center point, a 120 m (394 ft.) by 120 m grid was established by placing pin flags at 10 m (32 ft.) intervals on the east and west ends of the grid block (Figure 1). The researchers walked each transect east to west bidirectionally, 13 transects in total. Any cultural features observed on the landscape were flagged and recorded with GPS (Table 1) and are presented on the area map (Figure 1). A site datum was established immediately south of Grave 4 at the UTM coordinates 443642.628 3567028.006. The primary features of interest that serve as indicators of a historical cemetery

and can be identified through pedestrian survey include linear depressions marking grave shafts; formal stone, concrete or wooden grave markers; modified fieldstones placed as headers or footers; mortuary associated plant species, such as ground covers, cedar trees, and holly; and fence lines.