Can You Dig It?

From inside the hole he’d been digging, senior Ryan McGee handed a rusted “artifact” up to Ben Pykles.

“Looks like a fish hook,” observed Pykles, a doctoral student and one of the field assistants overseeing the excavation. He turned the relic over in his hand beneath a yellowing maple tree that spread above a dozen undergraduates digging in three perfectly squared, precisely straight-sided holes, which they called “units.”

“I think it’s a bent piece of wire,” McGee countered as Pykles handed it up to anthropology professor Robert Schuyler. An associate curator at the University Museum, Schuyler was standing on top of a dirt pile shaking bucketfuls of earth through a screen to sift out more archaeological finds.

“It’s a piece of wire,” he pro-nounced. Everyone turned back to work, scraping with square-edge spades, carrying buckets of dirt to the screeners or measuring the depth of a unit with string, level and measuring tape. The corroded wire was dropped unceremoniously into a brown paper bag, labeled with a marker to identify where the contents had been discovered: Vineland, N.J., Site 1, Excavation Unit 27, Level 5, October 22, 2004.

The dig is part of Schuyler’s long-term research undertaking, the South Jersey Project. It’s also the classroom for his ANTH 219 course. Every Friday and Saturday in the fall, Schuyler loads two vans with undergraduates and a few grad students for a day of digging and sifting in a hunt for “cultural deposits,” the refuse dumped in backyard trash pits of a now-demolished house. The home had been built in the 1870s and occupied for 50 years by Stuart Morris and his wife, Margaret. Their daughter, Helen, grew up there. The class has uncovered porcelain fragments from the face of her broken doll.

Romantic notions of archaeology get quickly tempered by dirt-under-the-nails lessons in digging. Pykles teaches the class how to excavate flat-bottom pits – one 10-centimeter level at a time – and to keep the walls square. “You’re not born knowing how to do it,” he said. “You have to know when to dig softly and when to take big bites.” Whether digging up the ruins of an ancient civilization or the backyard of a Victorian home, the techniques are pretty much the same. “You can’t really understand archaeology, if you don’t know how it’s done,” explained Sarah Chesney, a senior anthropology major.

In the spring and summer, Schuyler shifts gears and gathers his anthropology classes indoors in museum laboratories. Those students clean the artifacts and then dig up as much information about each one as they can find – what it is, when it was made, what company made it, where it was sold, how much it cost. The pile of facts they excavate fills in the details of life in the Morris household, right down to the cuts of meat the family ate, derived from cast-off bones the field class dug up. These up-close-and-personal glimpses of one family’s life will be linked with information from future excavations, along with archival research and oral histories, to piece together the broader picture of growth and decline and change in Vineland, since its founding in 1861.

“The South Jersey Project is my primary research project,” Schuyler offered. “It’s not an exercise we created for the students. They’re participating in an actual archaeo-logical process – and all the practical problems that come with it.”

Mostly, it’s grubbing on hands and knees to uncover broken bones, bent wire and other bits of rubbish. “I still get excited about finding rusty nails,” admitted senior Emily Lanza, another anthropology major. It was near the end of the day, and she sat on the ground with a few of the other ditch diggers taking a candy-corn break. “The artifacts define the day,” she added, and often lead to on-the-spot mini-lectures or group discussions on material culture.

“Oh, man! Oh, man!” Sarah Green called from her pit. “I got writing!”

Words on an artifact – a brand or manufacturer name, for instance – are often clues to a trove of information. A date can help fix the age of a level and the items recovered from that depth. Green, another senior, leapt from the unit where she’d been burrowing with a trowel beneath a big root. The class, all with soiled knees, crowded round as she wiped clean a blue-hued disk of glass with raised lettering that said, “Trade Mark Mason’s Improved, Registered May 23, 1871.”

“Instead of reading about other people’s finds,” remarked Lanza, “we’re actually doing the finding.”

The South Jersey Project is sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the anthropology department and the Vineland Historical and Antiquarian Society.

- Peter Nichols