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The Shindig | A Rubicon Archaeology Podcast
A Slave-Built US Civil War POW camp (Part 2) - with Dr. Ryan K. McNutt
Part 2: Join archaeologist Dr. Ryan K. McNutt as he leads us through stories of human misery from both enslaved camp builder and Prisoner of War perspectives, informed by his directorship of the archaeology and history project at Camp Lawton, a slave-built open-air US Civil War POW Camp established in the horrific winter of 1864 by the Confederacy to hold Union Prisoners moved from hellish prisons like Andersonville.
Meant to be Over By Christmas, the US Civil War lasted for four horrific years, leading to nightmarish conditions for POWs incarcerated within vast and poorly-planned prisoner of war camps.
In Part 2 of this podcast, Ryan talks about:
- Malnourishment, disease and death
- (TW) PTSD
- The wartime chronology of the site - Union invasion of the South
- Today's outreach program(me) and African-American finds
01:58 - local wildlife: alligators, mosquitos, tarantula-sized spiders
03:48 - digging the archaeological site of Camp Lawton surrounded by alligators
04:22 - POWs eating rodents like gophers and turtles to stave off starvation
05:07 - snakes: desperate POWs capturing, skinning and eating a 6-foot snake
06:04 - the horrors of malnutrition, disease, gangrene, blood poisoning, scurvy, smallpox, exposure
09:55 - money: 'Your survivability is tied on how lucky you are to have money'
10:28 - PTSD as a killer: the horrors of war and Camp Lawton POWs digging their own graves
12:45 - POW mental health issues: letters home talk about 'other' prisoners' torment
14:10 - boredom: keeping yourself busy with escape attempts, crafting (chess pieces)
16:02 - wartime chronology: Sherman's March to the Sea through Georgia and evacuating Lawton
18:44 - Lawton evacuees' deadly winter journeys to new POW camps; some back to Andersonville
20:10 - winter clothing in short supply: taking clothes off dead POWs
23:39 - past and future archaeological finds at Camp Lawton: 'time capsule' site
28:30 - investigating the African-American presence at and around Camp Lawton
Links:
https://twitter.com/CampLawtonGSU
https://cbss.georgiasouthern.edu/camp-lawton/from-the-director/
The Shindig is a Rubicon Archaeology Production.
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