Excavations at the Lawson Field Site Fort Benning Reservation Columbus, Georgia (Draft)

Archaeological excavation at the Lawson Field- site, Chattahoochee County No. 1 on the Ft. Benning Military Reservation near Columbus, Georgia was undertaken during the last, week in May and the first two weeks of June, 1938. Work was conducted and financed by the National Park Service as a special detail from the Ocmulgee National Monument at Macon, Georgia. The Society for Georgia Archaeology acted as local sponsors. A two-fold purpose was the objective of the excavators. The first was to examine a site of what was believed to be a known time horizon in the present Georgia prehistoric chronology, (1) the second was to determine if possible, whether the Lawson Field site could be identified as a specific historic and documented Muskogean Village, namely: Kasita. (2)

The first objective that of a “known time horizon" in our conception of the present Georgia prehistoric. Chronology, refer to an interpretation of the time element in cultures as delineated by studies of decoration styles in ceramics. Within the past five years, extensive work at Macon and in surrounding central Georgia territory has yielded a great deal of information regarding a chronological sequence of pottery types. (3) These sequences of style types in decoration, supported by accompanying ware characteristics such as paste, temper, hardness, surface finish and by vessel and rim shape; have been borne out by stratigraphic and distributional segregations. A definite typology could be equated with a definite archaeological feature or location. In this way, "time horizon.", as such, came into being in our particular bailiwick of the Southeast.