Protecting Michigan State's Material Culture
One of the most exciting things about archaeology is that you never know what you’ll find until you start digging, and sometimes you don’t know what you find when you find it, and that is exactly the case with this discovery. While digging the shovel test …
Hello, my name is Josie Cowles and I am a junior here at MSU currently working with the MSU Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) to excavate the old MSU observatory. The foundation was found by the CAP crew in May of 2023, and has been the …
Hi, my name is Katie Simonson and I am one of the students taking part in the 2024 field school, where we are working on the site of the original observatory here on MSU’s campus. Part of the foundations were found earlier in May of …
The importance of archaeological excavations revolve around the drive to uncover forgotten, and missing pieces of history; my time with Michigan State’s Campus Archaeology Program aided in doing just that. I worked alongside Dr. Stacey Camp and 12 other CAP crew members to dig up …
This past summer, the Campus Archaeology program had the opportunity to offer a field school to archaeology students from MSU and across the state—our first field school since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Directly taking part in ongoing CAP research into life in the …
Summer in Michigan brings warm weather, thunderstorms, beach days and, for Campus Archaeology at least, shovel testing, construction monitoring, and CAP’s on campus field school. As we head into a new summer of Campus Archaeology we recap some of the great projects our impressive CAP …
As this field school comes to an end, I sit to reflect on what an awesome journey this has been. When the field school first started, I was a little nervous about the type of work that we were going to be doing because I …
Lets just have a little wrap up of what the site looked like when we left today, what I did this week, and what’s happening next. This week I continued to excavate in Unit D with help from Jerica on Tuesday and Wednesday and Becca …
The field school is coming to a close soon and although we’ve made a lot of progress in Unit B, we still have a lot to accomplish during this last week. We are currently over a meter deep, which has made getting in and out …
After completion of nearly five weeks of the field school, it is finally coming to an end. Since the first day, our work area, the pit, has changed quite a bit. Unit C has come and gone and has been completely filled up with screened …