A Tale Of Two Ditches: Conserving Historic Features On Sapelo Island Georgia

Author(s): Carolyn Lewis

Year: 2016

Summary

     Last summer the Sapelo Island Cultural Resource Survey (SICRS) investigated the north end of Sapelo Island for archaeological sites that are threatened by both nature and man.  This area was inhabited by native peoples from the Late Archaic Period (5000-3000 BP) up until the Spanish Mission Period. Later european settlement divided the island up into plantations and estates, two of which occupied the north end of the island until the Civil War. In the 1920’s Sapelo became a private retreat for a series of wealthy families. The last owner, R.J Reynolds dynamited two ditches across the north end of the island to drain the low lying interior. Georgia’s DNR, the current owners of the north end, plan to refill these ditches in order to return the island to a more natural state. This paper examines the implications of backfilling the two drainage ditches that run across Sapelo Island’s north end.

Cite this Record

A Tale Of Two Ditches: Conserving Historic Features On Sapelo Island Georgia. Carolyn Lewis. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434728)

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Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 503