Rehabilitation Report, Demonstration Erosion Control Six Watersheds Phase I/II

Brendan Daniels

Rehabilitation Report, Demonstration Erosion Control Six Watersheds Phase I/II

Part of the Demonstration Erosion Control Six Watersheds Phase I/II project

Year: 2018

Summary

The first step in the rehousing process is to obtain copies of cultural resource reports, artifact catalog sheets, and field notes pertaining to the collections from the St. Louis District archivist processing the archival collection. The analytical techniques employed by each organization to recover and process the collections were reviewed to gain familiarity with the previous archaeological work that had been conducted on the sites. Draft report chapters and a final report with site descriptions were available in the archival collection.

This collection contains the artifacts retrieved from six drainages during phase I and phase II of a three-phase Demonstration Erosion Control project. Demonstration Erosion Control phases I and II (DEC I and II) included archival research and archaeological surveys conducted in the Yazoo Basin to determine the cultural resources of the area before the construction of grade control and erosion control structures. The University of Mississippi, Center for Archaeological Research served as the contracting organization, with Robert M. Thorne as the principal investigator in addition to Gay Fortune and Van France serving as field supervisors. Phase I fieldwork was conducted between 10 and 16 September 1985 (Contract No. DACW38-85-C-0127), and phase II was conducted between January 1987 and November 1988 (Contract No. DACW38-87-C-0022). Fieldwork consisted of extensive site surveys and pedestrian surveys. The investigation focused on six drainages: Batupan Bogue, Black, Hotopha, Long, Otoucalofa, and Senatobia/Hickahala; however, the Black Drainage is the only drainage truly represented in this collection. The other five drainages are only represented by the “diagnostic” material that was separated from the rest of the collection by the original investigators. Unfortunately, there exists no final report for phases I and II. According to electronic communication between St. Louis District archivist Amy McPherson and University of Mississippi professor and archaeologist Jay Johnson the final report for the third phase of the DEC project (DEC III) satisfied all contractual obligations. Therefore, all information relating directly to the artifacts in the collection was taken from the final report for DEC III, which focuses on the work carried out during the second and third phases. The title used by the St. Louis District for this investigation and artifact collection was found on the DEC II proposal in the archival material (Demonstration Erosion Control Project, Six Watersheds, Phase II, Box 1/Folder 12). For more information on these projects, see the final report for DEC III (Johnson 1997).

The artifact database can be found in tDAR at https://core.tdar.org/dataset/446826