Summer is a busy season for VHB’s Southeastern Archaeology team who are frequently in the field helping identify, document, and evaluate resources to move critical transportation and infrastructure projects forward. As the 2024 summer field season kicks into high gear, VHB has expanded their survey capabilities by hiring additional field crew, archaeologists, and a new Archaeology Laboratory Manager for our Tucker Archaeology Lab. These recent changes enhance VHB’s cultural resource capacity while supporting the wide range of services we provide to clients throughout the Southeast.
Jera Davis, PhD, was recently named as the Atlanta Archaeology Laboratory Manager and Archaeologist. Jera is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in Southeastern archaeology and brings more than 20 years of experience conducting and managing cultural resource management (CRM), museum-based, and academic archaeological projects. She received her BAs in History and Anthropology from the University of Georgia, and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Alabama.
The VHB Tucker, Georgia, archaeology lab was also redesigned to help the growing team analyze cultural material procured during archaeological fieldwork. The lab redesign will allow archaeologists to better facilitate artifact processing, curation preparation, and field deployments with project schedules all while fostering stronger ties with local academic institutions and enhancing client services.
The archaeology team serves a variety of public and private sector clients, primarily to support environmental compliance for transportation and other infrastructure projects. They helped deliver a record 54 projects in 2023 for permanent curation—the highest in a given year for the Georgia-based lab. They are gearing up to tackle a substantial volume of artifacts, with an estimated range of 40 - 60 individual bridge-related projects planned for the remainder of 2024.
Much of the material processed at the Tucker Archaeology Lab is prepared for permanent curation at the Anthony J. Waring Archaeology Laboratory located at the University of West Georgia. The most extensive collection delivered through this partnership to-date comprised nearly 5,000 artifacts from a series of tenant farm sites dating from the late 19th to early 20th centuries in eastern Georgia. Other recently recovered items in Georgia include a 9,000-year-old “Kirk Serrated” spear point and 4,000-year-old fiber-tempered pottery understood by archaeologists to be some of the earliest pottery ever made by humans.
Another integral role that the Tucker Archaeology lab plays is supporting the development of future leaders in the field of archaeology through an intern program organized by VHB in collaboration with Georgia State University (GSU). VHB Archaeology Interns are engaged in every aspect of the lab process and trained in CRM.
Beyond the lab, VHB extends its training to offering workshops to GSU students that fill the gap between academic and professional archaeology. Considering that 90 percent of US archaeologists are employed in CRM, the workshops present both valuable theoretical overviews of the profession and reality checks of fieldwork, such as safety guidelines, survey methods, and documentation techniques.
Learn more about Cultural Resources at VHB and discover our open positions in archaeology.