Chattahoochee Oconee National Forest Heritage Resource Management Program 1997 Annual Report

This report covers the fiscal year 1997 activities of the Heritage Program of the Chattahoochee and Oconee National Forests from October 1, 1996 through September 30,1997. The program operates under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, and the Forest Service's Region 8 Programmatic Agreement (PA) and the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Advisory Council and the Georgia State Historic Preservation Officer. The activities are presented in text and tabular forms, and in the Categorical Exclusion forms presented in the Appendix. They cover 5,508 acres of land surveyed and 40,062 acres inventoried without field survey. Field survey reports have been sent separately to the SHPO for review, and are presented here. The tables show 95 new sites found, and 47 of them that are to be protected from future disturbances. We investigated two major ARPA cases of site disturbance. They were prepared for presentation to the Federal Grand Jury in Atlanta. In one case, seven people were caught in the act of looting sites in a Wilderness area. The annual report also covers the myriad other heritage activities, including two historic archaeology projects. The first was with high school students at Hidden Lake Academy, on a NF sites adjacent to their Lumpkin County campus. The second involved test excavations at the "Two Chimney" site at Scull Shoals historic mill village in Greene County by the Passport In Time volunteers under professional direction by Forest Service (FS) archaeologists and Professor Judson Kratzer of Armstrong-Atlantic State University.