Staff profile

Charlotte A. ‘Sammy’ Smith, Ph.D.

Senior Archaeologist, Research

How did you become an archaeologist?

The spirit of being an archaeologist was fostered by the time I spent in the woods with my parents learning about the ecology of the landscape...trees, birds, mushrooms. I was fascinated by stories in National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine.

I first did fieldwork in 1976. I was part of an innovative field school at Michigan State that included site excavation, survey, interactions with the public, lectures, and artifact washing, identification, and curation. Since my undergraduate studies, I've worked on CRM projects in 14 states east of the Rockies. I've also joined regional survey projects in highland Mexico, which yielded data for my graduate research at the University of Georgia.

What do you do at Southern Research?

I concentrate on research and marketing, using my home base in Atlanta to promote Southern Research principally to clients based here. This includes research work at the Georgia Site Files and at the Georgia Historic Preservation Division of the Department of Natural Resources for Southern Research projects. Beyond that, my experience and interests in a wide variety of archaeological activities, including fieldwork and laboratory analysis, survey and excavation, historic and prehistoric sites, large and small projects, with both CRM and academic orientations, should be put to good use.

What do you do in your spare time?

I enjoy the anthropology of food, experiencing the culture behind the food we eat. I also enjoy traveling, and reading mostly fiction, and I do my best to keep up with current events.

What's the neatest thing you've ever found?

What resonates most for me are objects and features that convey a sense of the people who left them behind. So, in Georgia, that includes stills, chimneys, house foundations. When you walk onto a site and you can say "the house was here and the barn was here and the well was here...", you develop an understanding of complex family life...even when you can't see the ground at all. Also, when you're excavating, finding a cache of blades, blanks for stone tools, where they're in a cluster as if they've been left behind in a bag, I have a sense of the person who put it there.

So it's about studying people, not "things"?

I do archaeology out of an interest in people. There's a natural continuity between living people and those who have gone...which is I think part of why when I'm introduced to someone as an archaeologist, they're fascinated--it's a fascination with the common humanness in other people.

One of the more fascinating things about archaeology, even when you do research on sites where there is written or archival information, the archaeology can tell you things that are not in those sources or things that contradict those diaries or written records of the past. In those cases, in my opinion, the dirt does not lie.