Archaeologists unearthing the secrets of Fort Hawkins

In a matter of hours, a team of archaeologists changed the face of Macon's history.

Secrets, long buried after the demise of Fort Hawkins in the 1820s, are surfacing with the excavation of mountains of dirt at the historic site in the Fort Hill neighborhood in east Macon.

Historians, studying what the U.S. Army southern headquarters looked like, relied on an oral history collected 50 years after the fort closed and information gathered in two smaller excavations in 1936 and 1971.