Finding Aid, Mandeville Site (9CY1) 1959-1962

The Veterans Curation Program utilizes the standard archival practice of unique naming of collections. The purpose of this practice is to avoid redundant and confusing collection names commonly found with archaeological investigations. Therefore, this collection is referred to as “Mandeville Site (9CY1) 1959-1962.” It should be noted that on some of the documents the site number is (9CLA1). This is simply because Georgia changed the abbreviation for Clay County from CLA to the modern CY. However the name, "Mandeville Site (9CY1) 1959-1962," is consistent throughout the finding aid, the file folders, and the box labels. The extent of this collection is twenty-one (21) linear inches.

The original housing consisted of an acidic box with acidic folders. The documents in the collection consist of: photographs, maps, reports, correspondence, index cards, and field notebooks. There were forty-four original folders and several documents loose in the box, all of which were sorted into record series. Sixty encapsulated oversized documents were included with the collection. The oversized documents were removed from encapsulation to be photographed. Many of the oversized material photographs had to be digitally stitched together when creating the digital images. Once they were photographed, the oversized materials were returned to their enclosures and removed to oversized storage.

Numerous loose oversize materials in the box and folders were removed, flattened, and put into oversized storage with appropriate cross-indexing information and archival quality enclosures. All contaminants were removed, including the ferrous wire from a small wire notebook; the wire was removed, and the pages were maintained. Ferrous staples were also removed from the documents.

Some of the photographic material (17) in the collection came in envelopes and were removed to photographic storage. Approximately one hundred and five (105) photographs were attached to paper documents as part of reports. Because the photographs attached to the documents are associated with the reports, they remain with the paper documents. Photographs were cleaned with PEC- 12. Photographs that were falling off the attached paper were reapplied by applying archival mending tape to the back of the photo.

Folders 14/1, 15/1, 19/1, 20/1, 22/1, 23/1, and 42/2 contained extremely acidic and fragile documents due to water and light damaged. These documents were mended with archival quality mending tape and placed in archival quality enclosures.

Personally identifiable information (PII) was present in the collection and was processed in accordance with VCP protocols. First, the original document was copied. Second, the PII was obscured on the copy with a black marker. Then, the obscured copy was copied on acid free paper and placed back with the other records. Finally, both the original document and the copy marked with black marker were shredded.

Two documents that were originally not part of the collection were added to the collection under the direction of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The first was a journal article from the Society for American Archaeology’s American Antiquity, Volume 27, Number 3, January 1962, pages 336-355. This document is now part of the Report Records series and is titled, “The Mandeville Site in Southwest Georgia,” by James R. Kellar, Arthur R. Kelly, and Edward V. McMichael. The article was downloaded from an online digital repository named JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org) (stable URL http://jstor.org/stable/277800). The other document added to the collection was a manuscript from the University of Georgia Laboratory of Archeology and is labeled as manuscript number 164. This manuscript, while similar to others already in the collection, was added to the collection because it is slightly different from other versions already in the Mandeville document collection and is considered to be the final version. Both of the aforementioned documents were printed on archival quality acid-free paper and housed under the same guidelines as the rest of the collection.