History can be hard to come by in a city like Atlanta. Where people are usually too busy building new things to preserve the past, a collection like the Phoenix Project becomes priceless.

With roots that stretch back to the 1830s, Atlanta began with little design or forethought as a sleepy settlement at the end of Georgia’s Western & Atlantic Railroad. Down on the far side of the tracks, it picked up the name “Terminus” and later incorporated as Atlanta in 1847.

Anchored by nothing more than a milepost and a railroad crossing, it quickly sprouted into a boosterish, slapdash town of factories, taverns and tenements in neighborhoods with names like Slabtown and Snake Nation. But after just 17 years, the entire city burned to the ground during the Civil War.

It has continuously reinvented itself ever since, evolving from a dense trolley town to a sprawling metropolis of interstates and high rises. Now the heart of the nation’s 10th largest metropolitan area, it has often been willing to raze historic structures and even entire districts to make way for new developments.

But thanks to a Georgia State project from the 1970s, that pattern was broken — at least for a moment.

By the 1960s, a century after Union forces torched every block, the population had grown large enough that a rapid transit system became necessary. MARTA was established in 1965.

Around the same time, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 was signed into law, requiring projects with federal funding to take into consideration their impact on historic or archaeological sites. According to Glover, the act created the industry of “cultural resource management” in the U.S.

A few years later, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act became law in 1974, which obligated agencies that received federal funding to preserve historical and archeological data that might otherwise get lost or destroyed.

The construction of MARTA was one of the first major urban projects to take advantage of the two preservation acts, giving archaeologists the opportunity to survey and excavate miles of Atlanta dirt, rich with buried relics, for the first time.

Built where homes, taverns and dumps once stood, where Confederates and Federals once waged war, the MARTA lines would start at the city’s center near Five Points. From there, they’d run in the four cardinal directions to follow the paths set by the early railroads that spawned Terminus.

Tasked with completing 13.7 miles of heavy rail and opening 17 stations by 1980, MARTA broke ground and started laying track in February 1975, a year after the agency demolished the first house in the train’s path. Under pressure from the new federal legislation, MARTA contracted with Georgia State in 1976 to conduct archaeological surveys during the demolition and construction phases.

Led by Roy Dickens (B.A. ’63), an associate professor of anthropology, a team of archaeologists, student assistants and volunteers spent the next five years salvaging and collecting as many items as they could before MARTA displaced them forever.

Dickens’ goal was not only to preserve Atlanta history but also, as he wrote in the journal Historical Archaeology, to understand the development of American city life.

The field of urban archaeology in America was in its infancy when construction began, so Dickens and his team had to create their own procedures for collecting, excavating, preserving and cataloging the items they found. Dickens had also spent his career up to that point concentrating on prehistoric archaeology, so the project was even more unfamiliar…

…The exact number of items collected is still unknown, but between 1976 and 1980 more than 100,000 were cataloged, wrapped in brown paper and placed into site-specific bankers boxes. While Glover and his team have fully reprocessed more than 20 percent of the artifacts, about half of them have never left their boxes.

Now known as the Phoenix Project, the artifacts have risen from the ground — and come back from the dead — to make up the largest archeological collection ever associated with Atlanta.

Its size and variety allow it to be used across disciplines at Georgia State. Glover has a student interested in bio-anthropology who wanted experience working with and identifying animal bones. Now she’s using animal bones from the collection to complete her study and create a sub-collection for future students.

Over in the English Department, Robin Wharton has been using Phoenix Project artifacts in her writing courses. In one class, each student selects an object to catalog and study over a semester. Creating digital 3-D models of their objects and writing essays about them, Wharton’s students gain experience with historical research, digital technology and writing all at once. (Their work is available to the public at AtlantaArtifacts.net, where visitors can play with some of the students’ 3-D models and read their research.)

Items students have analyzed include a Civil War–era belt buckle, a porcelain teapot, a decorative makeup compact, a pewter canteen and, of course, the creepy doll head.

One student studied a 19th-century toothbrush handle and used it as a prompt for an essay on the history of dental hygiene. In 1866, Massachusetts’ Florence Manufacturing Company began mass-producing the “Pro-phy-lac-tic Tooth Brush,” which was made of plastic, not bone like its predecessors. The company spent a lot on advertising, and the student found old ads to include with the essay. On AtlantaArtifacts.net, you can view the toothbrush handle in three dimensions, complete with bits of dirtied bristle.

According to Wharton, her classes are “pulling archival material off the shelf and putting it into the hands of students,” which not only benefits the Phoenix Project but also gives students an “authentic scholarly context for learning.”

View more photos of artifacts and read the entire article from the Georgia State University Magazine here.