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For generations, schoolteachers taught
Georgia children that the state’s history began in 1733 with the arrival of James
Edward Oglethorpe near what is now Savannah. That information was off
the mark—by thousands of years. In fact, the land we now call Georgia
was the home of great chiefdoms and civilizations that left their stories in
village sites from Rabun Gap to Tybee Light.
Thousands of those sites have been identified in the past half century, but
the state’s urbanization is rapidly increasing the destruction of the
state’s prehistory, and soon bulldozers may erase crucial clues to understanding
the “first Georgians.”
That’s the message in a special issue of the journal Early Georgia published
in 2005 and led off by University of Georgia archaeologist Stephen Kowalewski
in an article titled “When the Past is Destroyed: Loss of Archaeological
Sites Due to Urbanization.”
“We’re losing information about the past at very rapid rates,” said
Kowalewski, “and it’s very valuable information. This is our only
information about these great realms of the past, and we must take steps to
learn more before we destroy it.”
Examples of recently destroyed sites are all too common. A site found by an
amateur collector not far off Interstate 20 in Greene County was bulldozed
for condominiums. Another site near Athens suffered the same fate recently.
Kowalewski makes clear in his paper that much of the destruction is inadvertent
and simply a consequence of normal growth in urban and suburban areas. Deliberate
destruction of sites is, in fact, relatively rare, though mounds all over Georgia
have been damaged by so-called pothunters for more than a century. (Looting
is a crime that can result in fines, jail time and a criminal record.)
“What we want to stress is that these sites have an information legacy,” said
Kowalewski, “which consists of all the context and relationships between
the artifacts and their surroundings.”
The amount learned in the past 30 years about Georgia’s early history
is staggering. For example, Kowalewski points out that in 1980 “no historian
or archaeologist knew that there had been a whole Native American chiefdom,
a province of several tens of thousands of people, in piedmont Georgia between
Milledgeville and Athens.” But now, it has been discovered and documented.
“Our message is positive,” Kowalewski said. “Archaeological
sites are worth standing up for. To destroy knowledge does not become humankind.”
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The
land we now call Georgia was the home of great chiefdoms and civilizations
that left their stories in village sites from Rabun Gap to Tybee Light. That
information needs to be recorded before it is destroyed, says UGA archaeologist
Stephen Kowalewski.
