Phoenix Project

In Summer 2023, I got a research internship position with the Humanties Inclusivity Program at the Center for Advancement of Students and Alumni at GSU. For this, I worked with an ongoing research project funded by GSU’s EPIC program. I chose the Phoenix Project, which is the revival of the MARTA Archeological Project conducted in the 1970s during the construction of Atlanta’s rail lines. The collection is massive, with an estimated 100,000 artifacts, but nothing was done with them until recently.

The project was already well-established by Dr. Jeffrey Glover and the many students that have worked with him since 2013, but it was still quite disorganized and not accessible to the public. I worked with two other students throughout the summer to ultimately begin an online archive of the collection’s most historically significant artifacts. This included photographing, researching, and cataloging anything with discernable branding that was able to be dated. Here is the link to the website.

At the end of the summer, we presented our work at Georgia State’s Summer Symposium.

In Fall 2023, I was accepted into the main Humanities Inclusivity Program, which is a 2-year-long mentorship under a professor. I opted to continue working with Dr. Glover to create a personal research project centered around the MARTA materials.

Since then, I have centered my study on the soft drink bottles in the collection. I also continued working on the website and I have done all of the photography for artifacts since then.

Atlanta has always been a major hub for soft drink production since the beginning of the industry, producing the world’s most popular soft drink, Coca-Cola, as well as attracting its competitors and knockoffs from surrounding areas. My work analyzes the soft drink industry in 20th-century Atlanta based on the physical bottles and cans found in the MARTA Archaeological collection along with associated historical research. The scope of the collection presents substantial data for tracking brands throughout the time and space of 20th-century Atlanta to uncover an untold history of the Southeastern soft drink industry and its role in Atlanta’s history. Academic research on soft drink history and archaeology is rare, but a relatable topic to the public. Through my ongoing research, I have compiled a catalog of all the soda bottles in the collection along with publicly documenting interesting specimens for the Phoenix Project website.

I presented this research at GSURC 2024, and will present at GURC 2024 and the Society for Historical Archaeology conference in January 2025.