Ocmulgee National Monument: A Brief History with Field Notes

In this brief illustrated guide to the national monument located in Macon, Georgia, that conserves ancient Mississippian mounds and 12,000 years of human presence along the Ocmulgee River, Matthew Jennings and Gordon Johnston, like G.D. Pope and Lonnie Davis in earlier guides, introduce readers to the park’s history, archaeology, Native cultures, and landscape. Jennings both updates the history and adds an account of the intercultural exchange that the park has brought about between the post-removal Muscogee Creek people native to the area and Georgians of the last several generations. This new guide braids into Jennings’s concise historical overview Gordon Johnston’s field notes and poems, written while Johnston was writer-in-residence at Ocmulgee National Monument, about the park’s woods, streams, artifacts, and wildlife. The book includes transcriptions of oral stories by William Harjo (Muscogee) and an array of photographs and images, many of them new, that span the park’s history, including Ocmulgee, an installation by artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne/Arapaho) in Atlanta in 2005.