Archaeological Investigations at the Southeast Corner of the Inner Stockade at Andersonville National Historic Site, Georgia

The 1990 field investigations were successful in locating and investigating the Southeast Corner of the inner stockade line and determining the nature of its construction. The archeological remains of the Southeast corner were found to conform with the historical descriptions, and the stone stockade markers erected by the CCC in the 1930's were found to have been correctly placed. Approximately 70 meters (229 ft) of stockade line were excavated consisting of two main excavation units, one running 35 meters west and the other 35 meters north from the Southeast Corner. Although post preservation was extremely poor, the walls of the Southeast Corner were apparently constructed with squared posts set in a wall trench roughly five feet deep in a manner similar to that found for the inner stockade line in the area of the North Gate (Prentice and Mathison 1989). During the five week field season, a total of 958.5 person hours were expended in the field while excavating a total area of 174 square meters. Of this total, 163 square meters were excavated during the exposure of the main north-south and east-west stockade line excavation units. Five square meters were excavated while investigating an erosional feature near the west end of the main east-west excavation unit. The excavation of six one-by-one meter square units to examine the placement of dead line posts accounted for the remaining six square meters. Two test units from excavations conducted in 1978 (Ehrenhard 1985) were revealed while opening up the main excavation units. These test units were reexcavated in order to compare the reported results with those obtained from the1990 excavations. These test units consisted of two small trenches (CC and DD); one crosscut the east wall of the inner stockade, and one crosscut the south wall. A total of 497 artifacts weighing 9012.66 grams were collected during the. Artifact types included: 77 carbonized beans (Phaseolus sp.), 252 animal bones, one brass buckle, two brass military insignias, 37 unutilized chert flakes, three projectile points, four pieces of chart shatter debitage, two chert cores, two utilized chert flakes, 24 pieces of burned clay, two sherds of glass, one glass button, two metal buttons, three iron / steel strap fragments, four cut nails, one iron/steel buckle, one iron spike, 25 unidentified iron/steel fragments, six post/wood samples, one aboriginal pottery sherd, one silver writing instrument, eight pieces of cloth, 15 bags of flotation residue, 11 unidentified plant remains, and eight bags of charcoal. While the 1990 investigations were not as successful in identifying preserved stockade posts as was the 1989 investigations in the North Gate area (Prentice and Mathison 1989), the historical accounts describing the original stockade construction as consisting of squared pine posts set close together in a wall trench roughly five feet deep were not contradicted by the archeological evidence at the Southeast Corner.