December 2011, Discoveries

The Archaeology of Academia

By James Dau   Mon, Dec 05, 2011

University archaeology programs are best known for sending their faculty and students to far-flung corners of the globe in their pursuit of the human past.  From the Egyptian desert to the heights of the Andes, archaeologists have made discovery after discovery, peeling back layers of history with each layer of soil and adding new chapters to the story of our species.  Their work has been, and remains, supremely important to our expanding understanding of where we have come from.  Their exploits, however, have so captivated the public eye that they have come to define the entirety of the field.  Few think to look closer to home for evidence of the past, and fewer still to the academic centers that sponsor the research.  Yet archaeology need not take place exclusively so far afield.  The places we live and work every day, including our universities, are just as much a source of knowledge about ourselves and our past as any Roman hill fort.  The archaeologists at Michigan State University have, since 2005, been applying this principle to their own school in the form of the Campus Archaeology Program.

Dr. Lynne Goldstein has run Michigan State’s Campus Archaeology Program since its inception six years ago.  “It started in the summer of 2005,” she told me from behind a desk covered in papers and books. “Before then, nobody was given permission to conduct any archaeology on campus.” 

As the first land grant institution in the United States, the university has a rich history spanning the last century and a half.  Buildings were built and torn down, with new structures erected above the remains of the old.  The campus, perhaps unsurprisingly, looks drastically different today than it did in 1855.  Miles of asphalt streets divide a school dotted with towering laboratories, libraries, class buildings, and parking structures.  Utility lines and drainage pipes run beneath the surface. Yet the proliferation of blueprints, plans, maps, and written documents from every period of the school’s history did little to encourage archaeological study of the campus. 

“I felt one of the problems was that they felt there were no archaeological resources to be found,” Goldstein said of the university’s prior attitude toward performing such research on its own campus.

This began to change in 2005, the 150^th anniversary of the university.  The provost of the school, Lou Anna Simon, requested of its many academic departments that they each propose a project related to the university in commemoration.  The archaeology department proposed an excavation at the site of Saints’ Rest, the school’s first dormitory building.  Initially their proposal met with skepticism and doubt, but as the year continued the school administration saw a shift in personnel that was more willing to give the project a chance.  Work began that summer, and the results were better than even Goldstein could have hoped for.  The Saints’ Rest project shed new light on the lives of students at a mid-nineteenth century university, both in terms of their living conditions and their lifestyles.  While the official rules and regulations of the school had been available in documentary sources since they were first recorded, the school archaeologists found evidence of frequent rule-breaking on the part of students, as the team found a variety of historic alcoholic beverage bottles among the artifacts.  The discovery of wood-burning stoves, along with structural remains, helped the team reconstruct the dorm rooms these students lived in, rooms of which no photographic evidence exists.

The Michigan State University Campus, ca. 1855.  Saints' Rest is on the far left.  Photo courtesy of Michigan State Anthropology Dept.

The Saints’ Rest project was deemed a resounding success by all involved, from the team on the ground all the way up to the highest echelons of university administration.  Archaeological consultation became a regular facet of campus development meetings.  The added responsibility was more than Goldstein, or any one person, could handle effectively alone.  With such widespread support and a clearly identifiable need for an expanded archaeological operation, the groundwork was laid for a more permanent campus archaeology initiative.  The cultural heritage of the campus has since proven to be far richer than any thought possible, extending from the depths of prehistory into the immediacy of the twentieth century.  Such unexpected wealth necessitated the expansion of the Campus Archaeology Program into its current form, an organization of the school’s anthropology department involved in most development and construction projects on campus, in addition to purely academic work.  According to Goldstein, this stands in contrast to comparable efforts at other universities. “Other schools that have tried similar projects tend to focus on a particular area of their campus," she said.  "I envisioned a broader scale for Michigan State, one that would allow us to be good stewards of our entire past.”

Students uncover the remains of a stove from the Saints' Rest site.  Photo by Lynne Goldstein.

The Campus Archaeology Program has continued to produce interesting and important findings since its foundation.  On a regular basis Goldstein and the students she now employs engage in cultural resource management for every construction project on campus, conducting field and archival research in order to determine whether any archaeological material is endangered by a particular endeavor, as well as taking steps to prevent the destruction of that material should they determine that it is in danger.  Concurrent with these small-scale efforts, commonplace in the field of archaeology as a whole, are larger projects which present more substantial academic gains.  In 2009, during routine shovel testing in advance of a project to replace worn and broken sections of sidewalk in the center of campus, the team uncovered part of the foundation of a College Hall, the first building erected at the school in 1855.  According to the excavation report submitted by the team to the university, further investigation yielded the location of the northeast corner of this building, with the possibility of uncovering further structural remains during future sidewalk replacement projects.  With each new investigation, the Campus Archaeology Program brings new light to these chapters of the school’s history.

A Campus Archaeology Program team excavates along the Red Cedar River.  Photo by Lynne Goldstein.

By uncovering the past, the Program hopes to help solve the problems of the present.  “Like other researchers on campus, we want to address sustainability at Michigan State,” Dr. Goldstein explained, “By looking at transportation and food networks, we can gauge how sustainable the school was in the past.”  By examining questions such as where the campus acquired food, whether by producing it on site or bringing it in from elsewhere, and how the advent of the automobile changed campus life, Program teams hope to shed light on what it means to be sustainable and how technological innovation has impacted sustainability at an institutional level.

The Campus Archaeology Program currently employs three to four student interns, as well as a part-time Campus Archaeologist, a graduate student who directly leads field projects and interfaces with the public under Dr. Goldstein’s supervision.  Katy Meyers, the current Campus Archaeologist, takes this responsibility to heart. “It’s important to conduct archaeology before any construction project, even more so at Michigan State because of our rich history.” 

In the last year, Project teams have uncovered a substantial historical trash deposit, as well as prehistoric features dating back millennia.  The efforts to gather data from these sources is ongoing, but the possibilities that both present cannot be understated.  The trash deposit, as with any such deposit in the archaeological record, has the potential to truly illuminate the lives of residents through the commonplace items they cast aside.  The prehistoric features, on the other hand, could very well add a new chapter to the story of this part of the world, extending its history back much further than before.

Simply reporting findings is not enough for Meyers, however.  A significant portion of her responsibilities lies with educating the public, both in and around the university, regarding that rich history and her team’s efforts to preserve and understand it. “Archaeology is a process, not just a moment of discovery," she maintains.  "It’s important for us to show people our field for what it is.”  Through the use of social media and public events at dig sites, she aims to accomplish just that.  By involving the local community in their work, by making their results accessible to this broader audience and encouraging their interest, they take the past out of the hallowed halls of academia that, in this case, literally surround these excavations and put it in the hands of those to whom it belongs.  The current local and student communities are the true heirs of the story the Campus Archaeology Project uncovers layer by layer, piece by piece.  “Through this job,” Meyers said, “I’ve seen that people really do care about the deep history here at Michigan State.”

Members of the community attend an open house during excavations.  Photo by Lynne Goldstein.

In addition to its academic goals, the Campus Archaeology Program also serves as a training ground for the future of the field.  Undergraduate and graduate students alike receive invaluable practical experience through Program work, both in the lab and in the field.  Every other summer the Project hosts an archaeological field school for Michigan State students, centering around specific areas of interest on campus.  The original Saints’ Rest project was the first such field school.  The field schools embody the three preeminent goals of the Campus Archaeology Program.  Academically, they aim to acquire greater insight into the cultural resources of the Michigan State campus.  As an arm of the anthropology department, they help educate and train students for work in the field.  As a part of the larger university community, they also promote public engagement with the past through guided tours during the field season, as well as by encouraging community participation through social media and blog updates.

Despite its many achievements and significant involvement in campus activities, the Program continues to meet with skepticism from those largely unfamiliar with it.  Many people believe that the presence of documentary sources in the university archives negates the need for archaeological research.  “We use archaeology as its own separate line of evidence,” Meyers said.  “It’s a different telling of the past as compared to the written record.”  Goldstein concurred, saying, “Archival documents tell you what people wrote about, what they thought most important to note, but archaeology tells you a different side of the story.  What people leave behind is just as important as what they write down.”  The truth of their words can be found in their earlier findings at Saints’ Rest, where evidence of rule-breaking students was uncovered through archaeology that would have never been found in the documentary sources that exist.  By reconciling material culture with the written record, a more complete story of a place emerges than would ever be possible with just one of those sources.

Campus Archaeologists excavate prior to a sidewalk replacement project.  Photo by Lynne Goldstein.

Archaeological research spans the entire globe, with teams working on every inhabited continent to uncover the truth of the human story.  So often our minds become captivated by the exotic nature of many of these projects, by the physical grandeur of the monuments that overshadow them or the inhospitable environments which surround them, that we overlook those projects which do not share the same sensational settings.  We find it hard to believe that a history just as important could lie beneath the surface of a place so deeply entrenched in the day-to-day business of modern life.  Yet the Michigan State Campus Archaeology Program proves otherwise.  By applying the same methods and mindset to their own community as they would a project on foreign soil, they have been able to produce findings every bit as compelling as those of the archaeologists their school has sent much farther afield, with impacts much more immediate.  The Program stands as a model for other institutions to take ownership of their own heritage rather than allowing it to pass by unnoticed. 

As Goldstein said at the close of our interview, “What we really want to do here is promote responsible stewardship of our own cultural resources.”  Archaeology, along with the material record it exposes and translates, represents our past, the very foundation of our culture.  By looking closer to home, the archaeologists at Michigan State University have been able to better understand their own origins, their own place in history.

By James Dau

James Dau received his undergraduate degree in anthropology from Michigan Technological University, and has worked on sites of industrial heritage in both Michigan and New York.  Now a writer, he seeks to raise public awareness of archaeological discoveries across the world.  When he’s not writing, he’s busy exploring wherever he happens to be.