The Works Progress Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, and Geophysics: Bringing Together Digital Geophysical Data and Historic Excavation Results for Comprehensive Data Sets

Summary

Under contract with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), New South Associates, Inc. conducted comprehensive geophysical surveys of five Mississippian sites in the Tennessee River Valley between 2013 and 2017: the Bell Site (40RE1), the Cox Mound (1JA176), Hiwassee Island (40MG31), Ledford Island (40BY13), and Long Island (40RE17). The Works Progress Administration (WPA) conducted salvage excavations on all of these sites in the 1930’s and the information available from their notes and limited reporting were the primary data sets used to study these sites prior to the geophysical survey. These notes and maps were often lacking detailed narrative and none of the maps could be georeferenced. The geophysical surveys expanded on these earlier data sets to survey the entire landscape, but comprehensive excavations could not be conducted. Combining the results from the geophysical surveys with those from the WPA surveys has brought the scanned legacy data into the digital world. The complementary data sets provide a more detailed understanding of each site’s archaeology across nearly 100 years of research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20477