UVM Field School

Click on photos for larger image.

Screening for artifacts.

Learning what the artifacts tell us about Vermont's Past.

Students excavating a test unit and recording their finds.

Making clay pots.

The finished product.

Perhaps the best way to learn about archaeology is to get your hands dirty by participating in a dig run by professional archaeologists. And that is exactly what students and volunteers did this summer at the University of Vermont's (UVM) Archaeological Field School. The site was a 3,800-year old Native American campsite located in Colchester, Vermont, along the planned route of the Chittenden County Circumferential Highway (CCCH). The summer 2000 field school programs were developed and sponsored through a partnership between the Vermont Agency of Transportation, the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, and the University of Vermont.

The site, known by the Vermont Archaeological Site Inventory number VT-CH-201, was situated along an unnamed brook in an inconspicuous wooded location off of Macrae Road. Native people most likely used this area as a travel route between Mallets Bay, on Lake Champlain, and the Winooski River. Small encampments such as this were created when people stopped for a couple of days or a week while traveling to and from larger communities or villages. The evidence of their daily routines (essentially their trash - such as bits of food in a cooking pit, broken pottery, and lost or broken tools) was left behind and forgotten for thousands of years. Once forgotten, these bits of everyday life entered what archaeologists call the archaeological record - the aggregation of evidence left behind by past cultures.

By all accounts the field school was a success. Participants, from 4th graders to retirees, were given the rare opportunity to unearth and study the material people left in the Vermont soils some 1,800 years before Christ. But it wasn't just the individual participants' intellectual curiosity that benefited from the dig. The public at large will reap the rewards of the excavators' hard work. According to Dr. James Petersen, the UVM professor of anthropology who ran the field school, "what we're finding is public property. It will be used for educational purposes. We want the public to understand the native occupants who were here thousands of years ago; we're working to help people be more culturally informed. We're trying to illuminate the past." And considering that only 25 years ago the popular myth and misconception was that "Indians didn't live in Vermont," the field school proved to be an extremely meaningful educational medium.

One of the highlights of the archaeological field school was UVM Consulting Archaeology Program's Archaeology Day Program. This hands-on program provided 62 children between the ages of 8 and 12 the opportunity to participate in the dig. The kids learned about the basics of archaeology and prehistory by participating in a slew of fun and dynamic learning activities. They dug side-by-side with the field school's teaching assistants. They made their own pottery using traditional techniques. They even learned to hurl a spear the way it was done thousands of years ago. The intensity of the kids' faces and their charming thank-you notes were testament to the success of the program.

VT-CH-201 was selected for the field school because it was a threatened site (threatened by the proposed construction of the Chittenden Co. Circumferential Highway or "CCCH") that promised to yield valuable information about Vermont's past. And it did that and more. By offering opportunities for participation to a myriad of individuals, the field school became a rich forum of learning - a dynamic classroom in the woods. Vermont Agency of Transportation archaeologist Duncan Wilkie summed up one of the program's ultimate goals as inclusion. In a July 25, Burlington Free Press interview he said, "Everyone was invited to participate in the dig. This is a summer program for people of all ages. We're committed to getting the public involved. We're trying to enhance archaeological education and to get anybody who's interested to come out and take part in this."

Sources:
The University of Vermont Consulting Archaeology Program
The Burlington Free Press, Tuesday, July 25, 2000
The Original Vermonters, by William A. Haviland and Marjory Power

Photos courtesy of UVM Consulting Archaeology Program

Article by Chris Slesar.

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