Near the front of Harvard Yard lies a small, fenced-off pit, with a dirt pile that seems to grow every day. Most students walk by, give it a glance, and continue along, but for some, the nearby sign captures their attention enough to warrant a closer look. After all, it is not every day that one gets to see the pristine grounds of the nation’s oldest university dug up like a dinosaur excavation.
In fact, it happens every two years. The hole is an ongoing effort of the Harvard Yard Archaeology Project, a collaboration between the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the Harvard University Native American Program, and the Department of Anthropology to explore Harvard’s buried past. Through the class A1130: The Archaeology of Harvard Yard, students spend two semesters excavating and learning about the history of Harvard through the materials they find at the dig site.
The program began in 2005 as a joint effort between the University and its Native American Program, commemorating the 350th anniversary of the Harvard Indian College. “That was when we began talking about investigating the Indian College, possibly by using Archaeology in order to literally put the Indian College on the map, but also to raise awareness for the scholarly activities relating to studying it,” said Patricia Capone, a Peabody Museum Curator and co-instructor of the course. The College hosted a series of presentations on Indian education to commemorate the anniversary, and since Matthews Hall was due to be renovated, the Yard Archaeology Project emerged as a renewed effort to care for the artifacts buried beneath the Yard.
The Project initially focused on Harvard’s seventeenth- and eighteenth- century past, but after the successful locating of the Indian College’s site, the program shifted to a broader focus on the whole College, trying to trace back the earliest origins of Harvard’s buildings and its place as an educational institution for English and Native American students.
Over the years, the program has uncovered a variety of artifacts that illuminates the University’s history in unexpected ways. Medicine bottles show the ramshackle state of Colonial and Antebellum medicine. A shell fragment points to the seafood-heavy diet of Harvard’s colonial-era students. Fragments of wine bottles and shards of broken tableware show how some students continued to drink even as Harvard remained a Puritan institution (perhaps today’s discarded beer cans will become similar artifacts).
Other findings point beyond student life and toward the University’s technological developments over time. Remnants of print-type, cast alloy with letters used to press ink on pages, reflect how Harvard had the first printing press in the American colonies in the mid-seventeenth century. The press was central to the University’s efforts to provide colonial and Indian literacy, representing some of the first efforts at translating American Indigenous languages onto paper. “These tiny pieces of lead alloy are these small objects that really speak volumes—pun very much intended—about the goals of the institution at the time of integration of Indigenous scholars with English scholars,” said Diana Loren, a Peabody Museum Curator and co-instructor of the course.
Loren described how these types can be matched to books in the Houghton Library, specifically those of an Indigenous printer who translated books from English into Algonquian languages. In fact, one of the first bibles in the colonies was printed with this press, led by the missionary John Eliot. Known as the “Eliot Bible,” it is a full translation of the Bible into an Algonquian language, done in large part by a Nipmuc Indian called “James Printer.” Matching these types shows the early contributions of many Indigenous people in the educational and religious missions of Harvard.
While the dig is an exciting chance to uncover history, it requires students and staff to face the unsavory details of Harvard’s past. Even though the Indian College was nominally meant to educate Indigenous people within the colony, the effort intruded on many of their oral traditions. Harvard’s founding remains intertwined with the colonization of the original indigenous lands of Massachusetts, as the school educated many colonists who went on to influential political roles, including those that further exploited the Indigenous as the colonies expanded.
“While the dig is an exciting chance to uncover history, it requires students and staff to face the unsavory details of Harvard’s past.”
Students in “The Archaeology of Harvard Yard” explore this complex history through contextual background readings alongside the excavations. “This is a really interesting time in Harvard history itself, and I think the students really enjoy seeing reflections of themselves and their experiences, and the various challenges that Harvard students have faced in the past,” said Aurora Allshouse, a fifth-year PhD student and teaching fellow for the course. “It’s challenging some of the traditional narratives about Harvard history, and this is something that we explicitly explore in sections as well.”
The course leaders see the project as a way to interrogate that history using primary sources and the tools of excavation. “There are biases in any primary source, whether you look at the written or material record, but there’s a truth that archaeology gives to the lived experience,” said Loren. “What we’re doing is excavating the trash of daily life, everything that people left behind, and so there’s a democratic aspect to that. What you throw out tells me how you live and what your experience is like.”
Though the project requires immense coordination and planning, the course leaders hope they can continue running it on two-year cycles, uncovering new areas of the Yard each time. The project plans to uncover more of Harvard’s lost past for both the historical record and to inspire students to think about their place in this history.
“Reflect on the archaeological record that you’re making in relation to these generations of past students,” said Loren. “Think about how the goals of an institution change over time, specifically here at Harvard, and how the institution shapes you and daily practice.”
While this kind of Archaeology class may seem like something that would only welcome specialists, it welcomes all students, regardless of their concentration, to reflect on their place in Harvard’s evolving history. “Archaeology is everywhere and a tool for that reflection,” said Capone. “It’s right here under our feet. We walk by here every day.”
Ryan Golemme ’23 (ryangolemme@college.harvard.edu), who originally thought of this so he could write a joke about holes, is comping the Independent.