The first archaeological work at Owl Creek Mounds was supervised by Moreau Chambers in August 1935. He was employed by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and assisted by Slater Gordon, while E.T. Winston, a Pontotoc journalist and local historian, also helped. The crew, hired by the Federal Employment Relief Administration, was composed of local men. In a diary entry dated Saturday, August 10, 1935, Chambers wrote that he and Winston went into Pontotoc to arrange pay for the FERA laborers and learned that the workweek had been reduced from 48 hours to 30 hours; while there, he also obtained gas and groceries on credit for ten dollars at the First National Bank of Pontotoc because his pocket money had fallen to 17 cents as he continued the survey with personal funds. Chambers' crew dug trenches from the edges to the centers of Mounds II, IV, and V. The excavations revealed complicated layering, especially in Mound II, but few artifacts were recovered. At the bottom of the trench in Mound II, the crew found a large hearth with clay hardened by fire. A 1935 photograph shows Chambers' crew standing in the trench in Mound II, with E.T. Winston in the foreground and Wayne Harrison, James M. Watts, Wilson Dillard, Tom Crews, and Chastain Johnson behind him. In 1992, a crew cleaning dirt from Chambers' 1935 L-shaped trench in Mound II found a bottle containing a note stating that the mound had been excavated in August 1935 by Moreau B. Chambers and Slater Gordon of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, in cooperation with the Pontotoc County FERA organization under Works Manager W.D. Hiddleston, labor foreman E.T. Winston, and archaeological expert James W. Watts.
