This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

168
MISSISSIPPI A RCHAEOLOG Y
scholarship. In 1809?10, when Benjamin was only about 11 years old, Levin Wailes created a massive document titled, ?Journal and Field Notes on the Boundary Lines Between the United States and the Choctaw Nation of Indians Surveyed.. .by Levin Wailes, Deputy Surveyor.? This document, 249 pages long, was transcribed in 1878 by W. N. Whitehurst for J. F. H. Claiborne, and is contained in the Claiborne Papers at the University of North Carolina (Sydnor 1938:40; White 1902:261).
Benjamin had never been a journal writer, that we know of, until he started work with the Geological Survey. But once started, he wrote with a vengeance. Wailes? journal began on January 27, 1852, when he was 55 years old, and continued to INovempe^^862, 11 days before his death. Thirty-six volumes were composed during this ten-year interval. The small leather bound books that preserved his thoughts and observations are each about 100 pages long, but several are twice that size. Wailes? journals are similar to surveyors? field books, and he used them as such. His first volume is called ?Journal or Notes in the Field.? He later shortened this to ?Notes in the Field,? then to ?Notes in the Field and Diary,? and finally to just ?Diary.? The first four volumes and volumes 10?13 are preserved at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson (Wailes 1852, 1854); examples of Wailes? site drawings from those notebooks can be seen in Figures 1 and 2. The remaining twenty-seven volumes are at Duke University. Also of prime interest to archaeologists is one of his special notebooks?that which Joseph Henry requested??Notes on the Aboriginal Monuments and Remains of Mississippi.? This document is stored in Jackson (Sydnor 1938:307?8).
The sites in the ?Aboriginal Remains? notebook often are summaries of the diary entries. Because Wailes returned to some sites several times, he eliminated a certain amount of redundancy in the notebook. Consequently, everything that is in the special notebook is usually contained in the diaries, but everything in the diaries is not always in the ?Aboriginal Remains? notebook.
A Survey Archaeologist
It is amazing just how much physical energy is evident in Wailes? journals. Considering that he was in his mid-50s and no longer a young man when he undertook the work for the Geological Survey, his dedication to