Annual Report on Inspection of Archaeological Sites Being Preserved in Place by Georgia Transmission Corporation, 2011

This is the second annual report on the inspection of archeological sites being preserved in place under a site monitoring program developed by the Georgia Transmission Corporation (GTC).This report covers site inspections conducted during the calendar year 2011, and future annual reports will detail the results of site inspections conducted each subsequent year. Sites being preserved in place are inspected on intervals ranging from annually to every five years, and each year additional sites are added to the monitoring list as they reach five years from the date of initial recording. The main objective of the inspections is to observe how well sites are being preserved and to report problems and solutions for those sites where preservation in place is not working.

In addition to simple inspections of sites on the monitoring list, the annual reports may in some years describe site assessments, a term that here includes a range of activities beyond visual inspection. These assessments include archeologically re‑evaluating the significance of select sites (some early sites may not be considered significant by today's criteria), ground truthing apparent mistakes or questions with site data and evaluating the extent of damage to sites from a variety of causes, such as looting, erosion or construction/grading. Assessments may or many not occur every year, but will be conducted as warranted.

This 2011 annual report summarizes the inspection results of 18 sites, ten that were discovered in 2006 and thus were subject to their first inspection, three that were first inspected in 2006 and were due their regular five‑year inspections, and two that were inspected last year but were revisited this year due to preservation issues discovered in their first inspections the previous year. Two more sites were inspected because they are scheduled for annual inspections until preservation issues with them are resolved, and one site was visited by our company on a project unrelated to the Site Monitoring project.

In addition to the initial base‑line report and the subsequent annual reports, the site monitoring program includes the maintenance of a "Compendium of Data", in which is kept detailed information for each of the monitored sites, including field notes, maps, photographs, and periodic inspection reports that describe the current state of preservation and preservation issues in need of attention. Currently four copies of the compendium exist, one is maintained at Southeastern Archeological Services, one at Georgia SHPO, and two at GTC. As part of the 2011 annual report, these four Compendiums, contained in large, three‑ring binders, have been updated with additional pages added to them.