Archaeological Testing at the Hartley-Posey Site, 9TR12

This brief report describes archaeological testing conducted during the summer of 1997 at the Hartley-Posey site (9Tr12) in Taylor County in west-central Georgia. This places it some 5 miles below the fall line on a high bluff on the western bank of the Flint River near the mouth of Patsiliga Creek. The work was a part of the summer 1997 University of Georgia Archaeological Field School. This single-mound site is owned by Barbara and Sonny Hartley of Roberta, Georgia. Both are to be thanked for permission to conduct our brief project on their land. They also kindly gave us permission to use their small cabin located just east of the site, overlooking the Flint River, as our base camp and kitchen. The actual project took place from June 30 to July 2, 1997. The crew consisted of myself as Field Director, John Chamblee as Field Assistant, and the following 15 UGA students: Adrienne Bruce, Kristin Chiari, Hugh Dorsey, Sharon Egan, Elsa Heckman, Meredith Jackson, Steve Lotti, Ricah Marquez, Maron Nasser, Ryan Ross, Adam Vaiden, Emily Williams, Alan Young, Jeff Rhodes, and Steve Sears. I thank John and the students for their hard work. Also along for the brief project was Eric Brown of Penn Yan, New York, who is my nephew. The birth of this project goes back to my first brief visit to the site in late 1984 or early 1985. At that time, I was contemplating a project on the nearby Neisler site (9Tr2), and perhaps the Hartley-Posey site at some uncertain time in the future. I talked with the Mathews family, the owners of Neisler, visited that site, and was guided by them to Hartley-Posey. As I remember, all I did was glance at the mound, staying there less than five minutes. What I saw was a site in a very open pasture, with a mound about 10 feet high. In the following year, I became more deeply involved with excavations at other sites in the Oconee Valley, well to the east of the Flint River. At the University of Georgia in late 1985, and early 1986, student John Worth became interested in the Flint River valley and conducted test excavations at both Neisler and Hartley-Posey. His work was completed in 1988 as his University of Georgia Master's Thesis in the Department of Anthropology (Worth 1988:32-53). My work continued to be focused in the Oconee Valley. In the late spring of 1997 my intended plans for the annual University of Georgia Archaeology Field School to be conducted at sites in the Oconee Valley had to be changed at the last minute, due to factors beyond my control. I then began to think of other possibilities for the summer program, and my mind returned to the Flint River valley once again. I knew from the work of John Worth, that he had placed a single test pit in the garbage deposits off the northeastern edge of the mounds at Hartley-Posey and Neisler, but had done no testing that would define the sizes or shapes of the villages around the mounds. Further, he had made no contour map of the Hartley Posey site or mound. I contacted John Worth, who had completed his doctoral work at the University of Florida, returning to Georgia in a position with the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta. He had maintained contacts with the owners of the Hartley-Posey site and agreed that a simple and very useful project for the students would be to map the site and the mound, and to shovel test the village to define its shape and distribution. With his help, permission was obtained for the present project from Barbara and Sonny Hartley, as noted at the beginning. While I had not seen the site in almost 13 years, John had seen it in the winter of 1996-1997 and told me he believed the site could be mapped. When I arrived at the site with the students and my nephew in tow on June 30,1997, I was shocked to discover that this sadly was not the case. The young forest covering the site was quite thick, and I immediately knew that it would not be possible to make an accurate or complete map of the village. Additionally, it would not be possible to place a grid over the site to provide control for systematic shovel testing in the time available to us. Since we were already at the site, however, I decided to see what limited work could be accomplished. We began by clearing the mound of small brush and undergrowth to permit us to make a contour map of the mound (Figure 1). We also placed four lines of posthole tests away from the mound at approximately 20 meter intervals, roughly along the cardinal directions. Finally, a single 2 meter excavation square was placed in the village about 45 meters south of the mound. These three simple projects were accomplished, along with a few elevation points made in the village. All of these projects are reviewed separately here.