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| 07-02-2004 | Previous edition: 06-30-2004 |
        
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Printer-friendly version Archaeology project lets students, teachers excavate old schoolhouseBy Jon MillsSummer Reporter To most people, the word archaeology conjures up images of Indiana Jones uncovering a lost city in Egypt. However, archaeology is broader than that and can really teach us something about our own history, said Deborah Rotman, assistant professor of anthropology and director of the field school. Rotman and her class, Anthropology 428, along with teachers from around the state participating in Project Archaeology, are out in the field conducting an excavation of the Wea View Schoolhouse. The remnants of the schoolhouse are located at the corner of Newman and Sharon Chapel roads in Wabash Township. The schoolhouse dates back to at least 1866 and was closed in 1916 and later demolished, making it a perfect case study. The Purdue Research Foundation, a private not-for-profit organization, now owns the land the schoolhouse was formerly located on, which made it an ideal place to excavate, said Rotman. Even though the land is owned by the research foundation, Rotman still had to go through a process for getting approval, which included getting permits from the state of Indiana. Rotman emphasized the importance of understanding history in relation to the site in order to confirm or refute the historical evidence. "One of the reasons we are interested in the schoolhouse is not only because it’s a place of education, but in the 19th century it would have also been a community center," said Rotman. Rotman compares archaeology to detective work in that the job of an archaeologist is to piece together the story based on the items you find. "We are finding everything from personal items such as buttons, a necklace pendent, some marbles and lots of architectural debris, window glass, mortar, brick," said Rotman. Learning about the past through the historical digs is one of the reasons Purdue partnered with the Indiana State Museum in a project that brought educators from around the state to Purdue for a three-day workshop called Project Archaeology. Project Archaeology is a program that gives hands-on training to teachers and gives them tools they can use in the classroom, said Alicia Stewart, Indiana coordinator for Project Archaeology. "The teachers get a workbook called ‘Intrigue of the Past.’ It has 28 hands-on workshops that they can use in the classroom," said Stewart. Gloria Berdehoeft, a kindergarten teacher at Trinity Lutheran in Indianapolis, recalled how she has been interested in archaeology ever since she dug up a squirrel from under a tree during her childhood. Now she hopes that she can relate her experiences at the dig to her students. "I think it teachers children a higher level of thinking skills," Berdehoeft said. "Sorting, classifying and just thinking about what is in your backyard." The three-day workshop was $75 per teacher and was capped at 10 teachers to better the experience of everyone involved. The teachers were not the only ones that were gaining experience at the excavation site. Eleven undergraduate students and one graduate student are participating in the dig that will take the rest of the summer to complete. The most notable item found so far has been a broken dish said Rotman. "I always tell my students it’s not what we find, it’s what we find out." A lot of the work the Purdue students do is either confirming or refuting historical documents. That’s where the detective work comes in, said Rotman "I love history, so this is kind of putting the history into action," said Brian Barrows, a senior history major in the School of Liberal Arts. "There is so much history around us that people don’t even realize is right in their backyards, so often people think of archaeology as something that happens in Egypt or Mesopotamia and something exotic," said Rotman. "When the reality is that we use archaeology to understand our own collective pasts and our own stories right in our neighborhoods." Printer-friendly version |
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