W.P.A. Archaeological Excavations in Chatham County, Georgia: 1937 - 1942

In 1936, Preston Holder initiated archaeological excavations in coastal Glynn County, Georgia, as an extension of the larger W.P.A. project underway near Macon, Georgia. Holder's primary goal was to discover stratified sites useful in chronology building, but he failed to find such sites in Glynn County. In 1937, Holder relocated to Chatham County, Georgia, where excavations were begun at the Irene site.

Full scale W.P.A. excavations started in Chatham County in September 1937. The Irene site was selected to serve as the focus of the Chatham County project, and excavations were conducted there continuously from September 1937 to December 1939 (Caldwell and Mccann 1941:1) . These massive excavations were successively directed by Preston Holder, Vladimir Fewkes (1938), Claude Schaeffer (1939), and Joseph Caldwell (1939, 1940). A final report describing the Irene site excavations was published less than two years after excavations ended (Caldwell and Mccann 1941). Clearly, the Irene site received extensive investigation by W.P.A. crews, but there were many other Chatham County sites investigated.

For at least the first few months of the Chatham County Project, little work was conducted away from the Irene site. In January, 1938, a small crew, apparently directed by Preston Holder and Antonio Waring, was dispatched to the Meldrim site (9CH12) on Wilmington Island to excavate a series of test pits. Excavations at the Meldrim site lasted only a few days, and only a draft report was written by the excavators.

Between January 1938 and the Spring of 1942, several sites including Bilbo (9CH4), the Deptford Burial Mound (9CH2A), the Budreau Site (9CH9), the Dotson Mounds (9CH10), the Oemler site (9CH8), the two Walthour sites (9CH11 and 9CH16), four sites at Cedar Grove (9CH13, 9CH17, 9CH18, and 9CH19), and the Deptford site (9CH2) were excavated. Laboratory work on the recovered collections at that time included washing, labeling of individual sherds with provenance information, and sorting of sherds into types. Preliminary reports were drafted by the excavators, and work on artifact plates to be included in the final reports may also have been begun at this time.

The beginning of World War II brought all of this activity to an abrupt end. Field work ceased, and the laboratory was closed. Collections from the last site excavated, the Deptford site, were only partially processed by the time the lab closed, and those collections were boxed up, unwashed. Much of the Deptford site collection remains unwashed today in the original field collection bags.