Protecting Michigan State's Material Culture
Our second week of field school moved us from the Old MSC Power Plan to just west of Beaumont Tower, across West Circle Drive from the Library. Although we continued to dodge raindrops for the entire week, we managed to survey an enormous area in …
For students, first week of any field school is a process of getting your feet wet, getting to understand your surroundings, getting to know your crew mates, and starting to get a feel for how archaeology works. For the directors and supervisors, it’s a time …
In one week, the 2010 Campus Archaeology Field School will begin, and we’d like you to be a part of it.
16 students have enrolled in our Field School, and they will be doing the dirty work: digging, screening, and cleaning artifacts. However, we want this project to be more than an exercise in learning about archaeology and MSU’s past for them. We want it to be an opportunity for you, as well.
As always, we will be continuing to tweet and post to Facebook with updates about what is happening while we are excavating, where we are digging, and why we’re doing what we’re doing. We encourage you to keep asking us questions, help us identify artifacts, or send in memories about where we are excavating. We will also provide you with summary posts to this blog every week about our weekly progress.
You are also welcome to visit us on-site. We will be excavating in the West Circle area of campus, conducting survey during the first few weeks, and will select a permanent location based on our survey results. If you do visit, you will be taken around the site by our students, who will be acting as tour guides.
The final way to take part is to continue being a part of our online community. Our students will be posting to the Field School class blog, and will be doing so with you in mind. Each post will discuss what they’re learning, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. They may cover a range of topics from posts about certain artifacts, techniques and methods, or links between the archaeological record and MSU’s past. We hope that you will take the time to subscribe to the RSS Feed, read their posts, and provide them with questions and reflections about what they’re up to. This portion of the field school is designed to teach them about the importance of interacting with the community, and your participation will help to make that a worthwhile experience for them. Please be mindful that this space is a virtual classroom, and that they are learning. If you have any problems about what or how they’re being taught, please direct your concern to the project directors, Lynne Goldstein and Terry Brock.
Please visit our class website here, and visit the “For the Public” link to read about your role in the Field School!
The MSU Campus Archaeology Program and the Department of Anthropology are pleased and excited to announce that there will be a summer archaeological field school on MSU’s historic campus. An archaeological field school provides formal training for students, teaching them the fundamental methods of archaeological …
This past Tuesday, the Campus Archaeology Program completed their testing at College Hall, in an effort to determine whether or not a summer field school would be possible at the site. Unfortunately, the results are not favorable. The extensive historical survey, and the photographs that …