Digging Before the Tower Comes Down: Urban Archeology Corps Interns at Chickamauga & Chattanooga

The Urban Archeology Corps (UAC) is a national program in which interns help National Park Service archeologists carry out real projects. At Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park, a UAC team worked with archeologists from the NPS Southeast Archeological Center (SEAC) on small projects such as site evaluations and archeological compliance work.

UAC interns at work at the radio tower site. NPS

Learning the basics

The archeologists started with the fundamentals: What is an artifact? What is an archeological site? What is cultural resource management, and why does it matter? They showed the interns how to examine artifacts and how archeologists analyze them. Then the interns helped carry out a Section 106 shovel test survey.

The radio tower

One compliance project was in the Moccasin Bend National Archeological District, around the base of an old radio tower. Built in the 1950s on top of a Civil War earthwork, the tower had long been abandoned and was falling apart. The park wants to remove it, restore the view, and add interpretive kiosks where visitors can learn about the earthworks that once stood there.

Before heavy equipment could go in, though, the site had to be surveyed to find out whether anything of the earthworks survived. SEAC and the UAC team dug several shovel tests around the tower. They found little sign that any part of the earthworks was still intact when the tower was built.

UAC interns learning about Civil War earthworks. NPS, SEAC

Screening soil for artifacts. NPS, SEAC

Fridays were for archeology

The interns spent Monday to Thursday on trail projects. Friday was "education day," given over to archeology. On one of them, the archeologists brought out their atlatl — a spear-thrower — to show how early people hunted. Older than the bow and arrow, an atlatl is a stick or small board with a notch at one end, sometimes weighted, that lets a person throw a spear or dart harder and farther than by hand.

Sources

Based on "Not Just a Walk in the Park: The Urban Archeology Corps at Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Rewritten in hubnx's own words.