Digging for the truth is never an easy feat. The team behind the Cluskey Embankment Stores Archaeology Project spent the past few months, since early November, getting their hands dirty, literally, in order to find the truth behind the historic Savannah structures.
The Cluskey Embankment Stores were completed in 1842, predating City Hall by over 60 years. But other than being used for parking on the Drayton Street Ramp the past several decades, the city wasn’t exactly sure what the vaults were used for. So in the summer of 2011, five young men from the Shinhoster Youth Leadership Group asked the acting City Manager about the history of the site. And thus, the Cluskey Embankment Stores Archaeology Project was underway.
Beginning with a LiDAR scan (Light Detection and Ranging) on Nov. 4, an archaeology team from Georgia Southern University started to reveal the structure.
Blake Ayala, a GSU Graduate Assistant on the Cluskey project, explained how the initial scan would help the city in future restorations because of the “brick-by-brick” digital model that LiDAR and the GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) provided.
The project was intended to discover what exactly these vaults were used for. Artifacts that have been uncovered include ceramic pipes and elixir bottles that “seem to have been bottled right here in Savannah,” stated Ayala. The archaeologists would dig underneath the vaults until they hit the “Cluskey layer,” which is the layer of a white sand foundation.
“For this project,” Ayala said, “there was no reason to go beyond that (layer).”
Ayala hopes the uncovering of these vaults could be the springboard that Savannah needs to endorse these types of archeological projects.
“I hope that the city will continue to do more projects like this, with different structures, not just this one. Because there’s so many of them that they can do,” said Ayala. “Hopefully they’ll continue to go to Georgia Southern or Armstrong or SCAD … I do hope that the city will continue to look into these historic structures and do more preservation on them.”
Why should we care about how much we understand these historical structures? “It really helps the tourism,” Ayala adds.
To see a timeline and photographs of the Cluskey project click here.
