http://www.macon.com/198/story/117561.html

Posted on Tue, Aug. 21, 2007

Group looking at ways to incorporate archaeological finds into Water Works
Park

By S. Heather Duncan

When Macon's newest and biggest city park opens to the public next year,
you'll be able to picnic in the same spot where people have been eating
their dinners for 10,000 years.

Archaeological research is being conducted throughout the 185 acres,
surrounded by a bend in the Ocmulgee River, where NewTown Macon is
developing Water Works Park. Surface collections in past decades, combined
with a new study, reveal hundreds of spear points, primitive knives, shards
of prehistoric pottery and more.

"I got 9,000 years of history in shoe boxes," said David Mincey Jr. of
Lizella, who collected arrowheads, groove axes and large pieces of pottery
on the property when he was a boy in the 1950s.

NewTown officials are taking suggestions from the public about how to
incorporate the vast history of human settlement into the new park,
expected to open next year and eventually connect to the Ocmulgee Heritage
Trail.

Chris Sheridan, chairman of the Ocmulgee Trail Executive Committee, said
park planners haven't yet discussed displaying the artifacts found at the
Water Works Park, where the Macon water treatment plant was located until
Tropical Storm Alberto submerged it in 1994.

But Sheridan said the park should include American Indian and prehistoric
history.

"Indian heritage is probably the least utilized aspect our area has got,"
he said. "There are three places on the North American continent where
there's documented proof of human habitation since the last Ice Age. To me,
that's a big deal," he said. "A lot of people would be interested in
learning about that and in coming to Macon to do so, and we'd like to help
those people."

A study being conducted for NewTown Macon by Environmental Services Inc. of
Jacksonville, Fla., has found seven new archaeological sites, in addition
to some isolated finds and a previously documented burial site bordering
the property. Archaeologists conducted shovel tests every 15 to 30 paces in
a grid across the property.

Their draft report states that one of these new sites is worthy of being
placed on the National Register of Historic Places because of its size and
the more than 200 artifacts found there. Draft recommendations indicate
that park planners should either avoid disturbing this area or do further
archaeological study first.

Mark Patterson, NewTown Macon's vice president for the Ocmulgee Heritage
Trail, said he expects a final report from Environmental Services within
the next month.

Artifacts found at the Water Works Park site in previous years date to
about 7,900 B.C., said Stephen Hammack, an archaeologist at Robins Air
Force Base and secretary of the Ocmulgee Archaeological Society.

But he said people continued to live on the site through the era when giant
earthen mounds were built nearby and into more recent centuries when the
Muscogee Creek Indians lived there.

The artifacts found at the Water Works Park site shed new light on the
local culture during the period from the years 900 to 1100 A.D. when the
mounds were built at what is now Ocmulgee National Monument.

"One of the mysteries of the people at the mounds is: How did they interact
with these other peoples?" Hammack said. He explained that many
archaeologists believe the mound builders moved here from another region
and "set down" along the banks of the Ocmulgee River among hostile natives,
who later intermarried with the newcomers.

PRIMITIVE LIFESTYLE

Finds at the Water Works Park site show that people who lived there had a
slightly more primitive lifestyle than the neighboring mound builders,
Hammack said.

Environmental activist John Wilson and Sylvia Flowers, a former master
ranger at the Ocmulgee National Monument, collected pieces of broken
pottery in an area that had been bulldozed by the Macon Water Authority
shortly after the Great Flood of 1994.

"You couldn't hardly walk without stepping on a sherd," Flowers said.

The decorative style on the pottery showed that Creek Indians had lived
there more recently. Flowers said the site was probably one of at least 12
towns scattered along the river during the 1600s and early 1700s.

"We had always suspected this had been a Creek village, and I think the
sherds proved it," she said. "That location is a perfect place for a
village: high ground surrounded by a river, with a natural pond."

Hammack is working on a paper for the Ocmulgee Archaeological Society
summarizing the three known major collections of artifacts from the Water
Works site. One includes the artifacts gathered by Flowers, Wilson and some
U.S. Forest Service volunteers, which Hammack now holds. Two others were
gathered by private collectors.

The oldest finds were located by Mincey, the Lizella man who is one of the
private collectors, in an old riverbed that filled during floods. Mincey
said he picked up spear points there from when he was about 8 years old
until he went to college. Back then, Corbin Avenue, where he lived,
extended to the Water Works and surrounding farm land. Boys shot their BB
guns there and swam in the river.

Mincey estimates that he has 500 or so artifacts that were found in the
dead riverbed, which was largely covered with silt by the 1994 flood. He
said he has probably given away 500 more artifacts over the years.

Mincey, 61, lost some of the pottery sherds, which were less interesting to
him as a boy than what he once called arrowheads. In fact, the points he
found were so old that they predated the common use of arrows, Hammack
said.

Mincey, who is now president of the Ocmulgee Archaeological Society, said
he started digging his cigar boxes and shoeboxes out of his parents' attic
and identifying the artifacts when he was an adult. Although he expects to
leave many of them to his children, he would be willing to share some of
the artifacts with the park as long as they don't end up in a basement
somewhere.

"It belongs to the people, and by God, people ought to be able to see it,"
he said.

The late John Pellew of Macon collected the other major group of artifacts
from the Water Works site, Hammack said. Pellew found 2 to 3 cubic feet of
material dating to a period between 500 and 1100 A.D., said Hammack and
Lonnie Davis, cultural resources specialist for the Ocmulgee National
Monument.

Pellew's collection, amassed in about the 1950s, came mostly from an area
near the road entrance to the site, Hammack said.

When Pellew died last year, he left his artifacts to the Ocmulgee National
Monument, Davis said. They will be entered in a database, but they probably
won't be displayed there, he said.

Davis said if NewTown wants to display some of the artifacts at Water Works
Park, the national monument would be willing to lend them as long as they
are insured, protected and displayed properly.

Hammack said he'd like the artifacts he has to be reunited with the Pellew
group.

Sheridan said residents who attended last week's public meeting about the
future of Water Works Park said they have seen people carry away bagfuls of
pottery pieces from the property during the past 15 years - when the law
would have required permission first.

"We really need to get some of those back," Sheridan said, adding that
NewTown would appreciate it if people would return that material so it
could be conserved with other finds from the park.

To contact writer S. Heather Duncan, call 744-4225.