Rood's Landing (9SW1) 1955

The Rood’s Landing Site (9SW1), also known as Rood’s Creek, was described by Caldwell as a Mississippian Period mound center consisting of eight mounds and a large village at the confluence of Rood’s Creek and the Chattahoochee River in Stewart County, Georgia. It was first described by C.B. Moore in 1907, and recorded again in 1939 by Wauchope (Atz, Huddleston & Sweeney 2000). In 1955, four of the mounds were tested by Joseph R. Caldwell (Caldwell 1955). Caldwell’s report was published in the journal Early Georgia in 1955, titled Investigations at Rood’s Landing. At the time of the 1955 investigations at Rood’s Landing, Caldwell worked for the University of Georgia, but the Columbus Museum of Arts and Crafts was also involved with the 1955 investigation at Rood’s Landing. A number of organizations were involved in the 1955 investigation at Rood’s Landing, including the Smithsonian Institution; however, the Columbus Museum of Arts and Crafts is listed as the Investigating Organization because they provided the majority of the funding to conduct the 1955 investigation. Because numerous institutions were conducting excavations at Rood’s Landing, the artifacts cataloged at the Augusta VCP do not represent the entire assemblage from the investigation in 1955; some of these artifacts are housed at the Smithsonian institute, and there is a possibility that there are objects housed in other facilities.

The Mississippian Phase of Rood’s Landing has produced the most artifacts and appears to be the phase in which all nine mounds were constructed. However, Rood’s Landing is not just a Mississippian Phase site; it is in fact a multi-component site with numerous temporal phases having been identified by artifacts collected by Frank T. Schnell and others. Occupations represented by the artifact assemblages include Paleo-Indian, Late Archaic, and Early Woodland settlements in addition to the Mississippian village/mounds (Atz, et. al. 2000).

Should additional information about Rood’s Landing be found in the future, it could be determined that artifacts from Rood’s Landing (9SW1) 1955, Rood’s Landing (9SW1) Arbitrary 1968-1979, and Rood’s Landing Tom Meltzer (9SW1) 1975 and 1980 could belong together or could be further divided. If this occurs, artifacts will need to be moved between projects.

The digital materials in this collection were processed by the Veterans Curation Program (VCP), and include the artifact report and artifact database. There are no additional digital materials held by the VCP.