Irene Mound was a multi-period Native American settlement located in Savannah, Georgia. What makes this site especially interesting, however, is that it was excavated by a team composed predominantly of women! Between the years of 1937 and 1940, 32 white women and up to 87 African American women were involved in the excavations of Irene Mound. The site had been commissioned by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) under Roosevelt’s New Deal, in order to tackle the huge unemployment crisis following the 1929 Wall Street Crash. At Irene Mound, many of the workers got their jobs because their husbands were out of work, thus labouring out of necessity. The women were poorly paid and Black women were paid even less than their white counterparts. On site, the work was physically tough, especially for those who were responsible for clearing the site and digging trenches, and the women also faced the stigma of undertaking manual labour, which was seen as undermining their femininity. On top of all of this, almost all of the identities of the African American women who worked at Irene Mound are unknown. All the TrowelBlazing women of Irene, who endured personal struggles associated with the field, and whose work was essential in undertaking the project, have long been denied the recognition they deserve! Our research on this site was spurred by the desire to tell their stories.
African American Women working on Irene Mound – Courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society Digital Archives
Site and Investigation Background
The site was located in downtown Savannah, in Chatham county. It was, however, completely destroyed during the construction of ship docks, controlled by the Georgia Ports Authority. It is thought to have been inhabited by Native Americans during the Middle and Late Mississippian period (A.D.1100-1600). Later, In the 1700s, Morovian settlers (Immigrants from modern-day Czech Republic), founded a missionary school on the site.
Archaeology had gradually been seen as legitimate work in the WPA scheme since the New Deal first began funding excavations in 1934. It is quite surprising how the WPA was at ease employing women to work on archaeological investigations, since “unskilled” women were usually only allowed to apply for domestic work such as sewing, making toys, or cleaning, a stark difference from the arduous outdoor nature of excavation. Public opinion at the time was also critical of the inclusion of women in archaeological work. With regards to the Irene project, the Savannah Tribune, a local newspaper, said:
“It is hoped that the clergymen will see the ones in authority and endeavour to have our women given such employment that the more benefit [sic] the sex”.
Despite this public backlash, the rising support of archaeological excavations by the WPA enabled archaeology to be considered a credible form of employment over time. According to American archaeologist John Cotter, the New Deal was responsible for “the birth of archaeology as a serious American discipline.”
Women at Irene:
Despite the fact that the project was run and passed between four men (Holder, Fewkes, Schaeffer and Caldwell), women made up the majority of the workforce and were involved in almost all aspects of work at Irene; from the surveying, human remains analysis, and artefact assessment, to public outreach and historical investigation. The notable contributions from some of the white women who worked at the site are listed below, and reflect their experiences of archaeology:
Born in 1887, Dolores B. Floyd was a prominent member, and librarian, of the Georgia Historical Society. As previously mentioned, It was her original self-published paper which kickstarted the whole Irene Mound investigation and brought attention to its archaeological potential.
Dr. Catherine McCann (1908-1986) was employed as a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania to fill a professional academic position at Irene Mount. Her particular interest in human ecology led to her TrowelBlazing environmental surveying of the region, a very new research method in the USA at the time. From her investigations at Irene, she published 3 papers and co-wrote the final report.
Adelaide Kendall Bullen (1908-1987) was a physical anthropologist and archaeologist. Although she only worked on the site for a short time, she certainly left her mark! She made a clay model of the site for display and wrote a poem about it dedicated to Dolores B Floyd.
Mary Granger (1897-1970) was a poet and writer, and a supervisor for the Federal Writers Project in Savannah. She used her workforce and her access to local research in order to compile a record of the topographic changes to the site over time.
Virginia Griffin was responsible for supervising the excavation, reconstruction, and recording of the cranial fragments uncovered.
Whilst the academic contributions of these white women should be celebrated, it is also worth noting that these would not have been possible without the strenuous clearing and excavation carried out by the African American women on site. It is possible that these women also contributed to the academic work, but were not credited. The lived experiences of the white and Black women on site were very different from each other, as working conditions for the African American employees were deemed by many as unethical. For example, there was only 1 outhouse for both men and women to use, the WPA provided very little equipment for excavators to use, and working days were long and very tiring.
The experiences of Black women on-site – conditions, pay, Gussie White, their involvement
One of the African American women working on the excavation was Mrs Gussie White. She was one of the few named African American workers at Irene Mound and luckily some of her experiences have been recorded thanks to her son, John White. Researcher Gail Whalen carried out a short interview with John and through him, we now know a bit more about Gussie’s contributions. In the interview John mentioned that Gussie took up the job because her husband suffered an injury in a work-related accident – a common predicament for many of the women on-site – and so Gussie, like many others, took on the role of the breadwinner. She was provided with little to no equipment from the WPA and was paid $12 dollars a week, ($213 dollars nowadays) before she eventually got a pay rise much later.
It has been found that The African American women were given much less importance on site and were unfortunately very underpaid, under-appreciated and overworked by the WPA. They also suffered the stigma from the public regarding their involvement with manual labour, which reflected negatively on their femininity. Furthermore, the WPA archaeology project was seen as a dead-end job – there was no legitimate career beyond the scheme. Most higher-up positions were reserved for white men and women. This does not, however, take away the importance of the roles of the African American women on site. Their work was essential, if uncredited.
Site Findings and Significance of Irene:
The main feature of the Native American occupation of the site is the Temple mound. There is also evidence of Native American burial mounds, small buildings which may have functioned as houses, and food debris present throughout the area. The general consensus is that the site was primarily a Chiefly Compound, inhabited only by the Chief, his wives and their children, with a total habitation of up to 40 people. It could also have been used as a social centre. Aspects of the inhabitant’s daily lives were also uncovered, such as ceramic production and food practices. It is believed that the residents grew corn and beans but also relied on shellfish and other seafood as a source of economic income (presumably trade) and as a source of food.
The project was also the first instance of women making up the main source of labour for an archaeological excavation funded by the New Deal programmes. The 3 main sites – Irene, Bilbo and Deptford, were dug up by an exclusively female crew mostly made up of African American women which were very unusual because of the heavy stigma surrounding manual labour.
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed reading this post! Our aim was to try to highlight the contributions of the many women working on the Irene Mound project and bring awareness to some of the key issues they faced. We also felt it was important to acknowledge the unique challenges faced by the African American women working on the project, and using the knowledge from the past, try to build a better future, where all women are given the opportunities and platforms they deserve. We have our work cut out for us, but organisations like TrowelBlazers help to bring women’s stories to light and make people realise that they have always been around doing cool things, they’ve just been invisible while they did them.
Extra Info!
The Georgia Historical Society
Oral history and Savannah Images Project and Irene Mound Essay
And if you have access to Jstor – Here’s a great paper!
Images reproduced by kind permission of the Georgia Historical Society.
Written by Zara Rashid and Juliette Grieve as part of the TrowelBlazers Digital Fieldwork Project at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL.
What’s with the “stigma of manual labor…reflecting negatively on their femininity”? This is horribly classist.Poor and working class women of all races were no strangers to manual labor in the first half of the 20th century. Many women are employed as manual laborers to this day.