Cultural Resource Investigations of Proposed East Tennessee Ball Ground Pipeline and Addendum

This report documents the results of archaeological survey of a planned pipeline corridor that extends from near Ball Ground Georgia northwest to the Georgia Tennessee border to the south of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The planned length of the corridor is approximately 75 miles, although a total of approximately 90 miles of corridor were surveyed to accommodate corridor reroutes. The corridor surveyed included 25 miles in the Piedmont, 61 miles in the Great Valley, and four miles in the Armuchee Ridges regions. Study of the sites located during this project revealed that the period most well represented by components within the study corridor was the Woodland Period, while the most poorly represented periods were Paleoindian and Mississippian/Lamar. That result was somewhat surprising in that it was previously believed that the Late Archaic would be most commonly represented by components in areas of Northwest Georgia like those traversed by the corridor, but in this case Woodland components outnumbered Late Archaic components by a factor of nearly two to one. A total of 103 archaeological sites and 62 artifact occurrences were identified during the field survey, of those 17 were originally recommended as potentially eligible for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. Four of the 17 sites were tested during the project, and of those one failed to meet the National Register criteria. Careful rerouting of the pipeline corridor resulted in all but one of the potentially significant sites being avoided by construction, and a data recovery plan has been submitted for the single site that could not be avoided through reroutes. That site appears to be a single component Woodstock hamlet or single house site, that should yield significant scientific data upon excavation.