Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
they farmed; 74 percent were renters, tenants, or sharecroppers; and squatters constituted
number of affected individuals rises from 450 to 1,800. This suggests the Corps underre-
ported the number of people affected by its project. Or maybe not.
Other, non-Corps-generated surveys and documents confirm that the Savannah River
valley was a sparsely populated but working landscape. In the mid-1940s, the Smithsonian
Institution's Bureau of Ethnology initiated a national archeological salvage project known
as the River Basin Surveys. The basin survey program evolved from TVA-sponsored arche-
ological activity at New Deal dam and reservoir sites before becoming a formal program
in Survey sent two archeologists, Carl F. Miller and University of Georgia professor Joseph
Caldwell, into the Savannah River valley to investigate the Clarks Hill dam and reservoir
area as one of the Southeast's first major interagency archeological salvage projects. The
two men traversed a generally unpeopled landscape in transition, and their narrative de-
scriptions and photographs clearly indicated the used, abused, and abandoned states of the
Savannah River valley's landscape.
The area's old domesticated fields and orchards had transformed into a feral landscape.
The land was not wilderness; but it was not entirely domesticated, and the territory ob-
scured past uses as much as the land was obviously scarred by some of those uses. As
Miller walked across private property and drove state highways in Georgia and South Caro-
lina, he looked for Indian mounds and potential settlement sites on knolls, in fields, and
at the junction of watercourses on sandbars, in bottomlands, or adjacent to shoals. He then
read back through layers of modern landscapes to find pot shards, human remains, bone
tools, and Indian mounds in wooded areas, orchards, cotton fields, and pastures. Miller's
notes included brief narrative descriptions of sites, indicated the existence of inconsistent
landownership records or occupation status, and noted previous land uses and current prop-
erty conditions. At the time of Miller's surveys, dated January through April 1949, the sur-
vey sites were typically located in cleared and fallow fields. But landowners and tenants
or renters clearly continued to use many fields—for cotton, orchards, and cattle—set to
be covered by the water stored behind Clarks Hill dam to control downstream flooding,
produce energy for distant urban and industrial consumers, and improve navigation in the
lower valley.
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Miller and his archeological contemporaries also noted land in various stages of use
and ecological evolution a few years before University of Georgia biologist Eugene P.
Odum—often cited as the “father of modern ecology”—began evaluating old field succes-
sion downriver at the Barnwell (S.C.) Savannah River site nuclear bomb factory in 1951.
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Miller categorized erosion generally and specifically in the Clarks Hill reservoir area. One
