 Student Archaeologists Consider the Way We Were BY EMILY HARRISON WEIR
Students got a crash course on archaeological theory and excavation methods, then hit the dirt to try out their new skills. After only two days of digging and sifting through the soil for artifacts, students had turned up handmade nails, bricks, and fragments of china in popular nineteenth-century patterns. |
Archaeology students uncovered lots
of |
| Further digging revealed a
fieldstone and brick walkway that Mangan theorizes went
through a botanic garden planted by early botany
professor Lydia Shattuck in the 1860s or 1870s. Diggers
also uncovered pieces of many clay pipes-suggesting that
students indulged in tobacco-and a brick-and-stone
foundation that may be the shaft of an artesian well
known to have been in the vicinity. And clues about what
earlier Mount Holyoke women ate can be detected in the
oyster shells and bones from cows, horses, pigs, sheep,
and goats found along with pottery, glass, and metal
objects in the "kitchen midden" (garbage dump).
Once items are unearthed, they're recorded, labeled, and bagged for later analysis. The ultimate goal, Mangan says, is to learn "what the artifacts say about the folks who used and ultimately deposited them. We're after the relationship between material culture and people's behavior."
More fragments of clay
pipes (left) were found than College workers would have
used, implying that some nineteenth-century students
liked to take a puff now and again. |
|
eneath the soil trod by current
students, remnants of Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke slumber.
Last fall, rectangular trenches grew behind Mary Lyon
Hall during the fieldwork portion of visiting assistant
professor of anthropology Patricia Mangan's course,
Archaeology of Mary Lyon's New England. Her sixteen
students excavated behind what was once the Mount Holyoke
Seminary building. "It's a unique opportunity for
students to actually excavate such a rich site on their
own campus," Mangan says. 
Digging stopped when
the ground froze, but there's surely lots more to be
found. "There were three hundred women living here
by the time the Seminary Building burned in 1896, and
that many people produced a lot of refuse," Mangan
says. "And some of what was destroyed in the fire
probably was dumped out back."