When Georgia Southern professor Sue Moore told graduate student Kevin Chapman that she had a simple archaeology project for his thesis at Camp Lawton in Millen, Ga., neither of them thought that they would have the national spotlight pointed at them.
That spotlight shined bright this past week when it was announced that one of the “greatest archaeological finds in Georgia history” had been made at the camp.
Officials from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Congressman John Barrow joined GSU at the reveal event Wednesday.
They didn’t find missing Confederate Gold, but in the words of John Derden, a professor at East Georgia College, the discovery of personal items belonging to Union prisoners is “symbolic gold.”
Among the artifacts found were buttons, bullets, hardware, utensils, nails and buckles for clothing. Some of the unique items included a tourniquet buckle (which also contained a piece of cloth) used during amputation procedures, an improvised pipe and a picture frame.
“Archaeologist are not used to this type of attention,” Moore joked at the press conference Wednesday.
Later she said, “I remember thinking to myself that this would not be a difficult project to manage as I did not expect that we would find a lot in the way of artifacts. I was optimistic that we could find evidence of the stockade and maybe some of the support buildings.”
She said that it was then that she went to Chapman, who happily got more than he bargained for. Chapman said that this discovery will help tell the story of men who were otherwise nameless in history.
“This may be our only chance – the one last site – to tell this story,” Chapman said. “It’s not the story of generals and great armies and great movements and dashing cavalry and the roar of cannon and musket. It’s the story of individual men and their desire to survive and their tenacity – as long as it held out…”
Chapman said the pipe was his favorite artifact to find. The artifact was rare in the fact that markings from the man’s teeth were found embedded in the pipe.
“It doesn’t speak to so much of the horror of the conflict, but to the resilience and ingenuity of the men who served and were a part of this encampment,” Chapman said.
The dozens of items that were found may not be the only ones according to archaeologists. GSU President Brooks Keel called the discovery “just the tip of the iceberg.” According to Keel, the artifacts will be on display in the GSU Museum in October.
“The exciting finds here are the personal artifacts of the prisoners that were here,” Keels said. “It really tells the personal story of this place and that’s what makes it so special.”