Artifact Catalog, Archaeological Data Recovery from 22LA545, Lafayette County, Mississippi

The procedures employed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), St. Louis District, Curation and Archives Analysis Branch, Mandatory Center of Expertise for the Curation and Management of Archaeological Collections to rehouse the archaeological material from Vicksburg District are discussed below. Upon completion of this curation management project, the Vicksburg District collection will be sent to Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University for permanent curation.

The first step in the rehousing process is to obtain copies of cultural resource reports, artifact catalog sheets, and field notes pertaining to the collections from the St. Louis District archivist processing the archival collection. The analytical techniques employed by the Center for Archaeological Research to recover and process the collections were reviewed to gain familiarity with the previous archaeological work that had been conducted on the site.

In January 1986, the University of Mississippi, Center for Archaeological Research began an investigation at the Coontown Site, 22LA545, on Sardis Lake, Lafayette County, Mississippi. Archaeological work was undertaken because a looter was removing artifacts of potential significance from the area. The University of Mississippi completed a surface collection and excavated the disturbed features. Funding for this investigation ran out before the artifacts were analyzed and the final report was written, so there is no contract number for this investigation. John C. Phillips produced a report out of professional ethics. For more information on this project, see the report (Phillips 1986).

The procedures employed to rehouse the archaeological material from the Archaeological Data Recovery from 22La545, Lafayette County, Mississippi investigation are discussed in the Rehabilitation Report. The report can be found in tDAR at https://core.tdar.org/document/446613.