Data Recovery at 38RD628, Fort Jackson, South Carolina

This report details archaeological data recovery operations at site 38RD628, on McCrady Training Center, Fort Jackson, South Carolina. McCrady is used by the South Carolina National Guard (SCARNG) as its primary training site. To enhance training potential the SCARNG anticipated creating a tracked vehicle training site in the “D-First” are of McCrady. Although direct impact to 38RD628 by the creation of the training area was not anticipated,, the SCARNG recognized that tracked vehicles in realistic training scenarios could easily impact the site inadvertently. As a result, the SCARNG asked the Applied Research Division of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, to conduct a data recovery project at 38 RD628 in the event the site was damaged or destroyed during training.
Three areas of the site were targeted for black excavations, with the intent of answering questions relating to the possible presence of a structure dating to the Woodland period at the site, a hypothesized Early Archaic component, the nature and identification of activity areas discrete cultural features in sand hill environments, the temporal placement of Oemler ceramics, and the geomorphology of the site was sampled with a gouge auger and then cored to determine if sufficient organic remains were present to provide data for environmental reconstruction.