Irene Mound Site Chatham County, Georgia

Archaeological excavations on the Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina coasts have been carried on intermittently ever since the Civil War. Probably the first investigator was Jeffries Wyman (Wyman, 1875), who dug into the shell mounds along the St. Johns River in Florida. C. C. Jones (Jones, 1873) discussed objects found from time to time in coastal mounds. Clarence B. Moore dug a large number of sites along the coasts of Georgia (Moore, 1897), Florida (1900, 190 I, 1902), and South Carolina (1898a), as well as on the Altamaha (1898c), Savannah (1898b), and St. Johns rivers (1892, 1894). Moore's reports have been the most frequently consulted in the present study. In 1936 Frank M. Setzler of the United States National Museum excavated a site on St. Simons Island, and in 1936-37 Preston Holder dug extensively at St. Simons and in the area around Brunswick, Georgia. The excavations at Irene Mound were begun in 1937 and completed in 1939. At the present time the authors are working at a number of other sites in the vicinity of Savannah, Georgia.

The work at Irene Mound was a logical continuation of the investigations by various governmental agencies at the Ocmulgee National Monument at Macon, Georgia (Kelly, 1938, 1939), and also at St. Simons Island and Brunswick. The Irene site itself was known to be one of the largest on the Georgia coast and bad received a cursory examination by Moore (1898, p.168). In addition, the remarkable abundance of pottery at the site indicated the remains of Intensive occupation.