Month: October 2026

Eleanor Retish’ 28

Every Monday, I wake up looking forward to two things: one, Peirce grilled cheese and tomato soup, and two, digging around in the dirt for three hours and finding fun surprises from artifacts that haven’t seen the light of day in two hundred years. That being said, it is easy to get wrapped up in the fun of the excavation and forget about the significance of the objects. Luckily, this week KAP is focusing on object biographies, which offers a great way to think about objects in a more anthropological and—I hate to say it but—less whimsical way.

Object biographies are an exercise of writing the ethnographic and historical story of an object, offering “a useful mechanism to explore and understand” the different meanings that the object has carried across time and exchanges (Fowler et al 2016: 212). The idea of object biographies emerged in the 1980s, pioneered by works from anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff, and aligning with the individual identity-focused ideas of post-processualism. By considering how objects affect human culture, rather than how objects are affected by humans, we flip the analysis from a passive to an active one and attempt to “understand the way objects become invested with meaning through the social interactions they are caught up in” (Gosden and Marshall 170).

To give an example of what can be gained from an object biography, we can look at our Bishop’s Cabin site. This past week in Suboperation Q, my classmates and I found two plain white cylindrical beads. Much more historical research is needed to create a complete object biography of them, but just from the current information we have about them, many questions to answer arise. What did these beads originally decorate? A necklace? A garment? Something else? Who owned the beads in the cabin, and did they have any previous owners? Where did the beads come from before they were brought to the cabin? How did the beads end up being buried? Although we won’t be able to answer all of these questions, there are certain things we might be able to find that would contribute to an object biography about these beads.

In Subop Q we are investigating how the rocks we found in it are related to the foundation, or if they are at all. If we determine this, then we will be able to understand geographically where in the cabin these beads fell and were buried, which might answer some questions about ownership. Additionally, doing more historical research on beads and beadwork in Ohio during the 1820s might allow us to situate the beads in their historical context, and perhaps understand their own personal history better.

As we transition in the next few weeks from excavation to analysis in the lab, we will be able to learn more about the objects that we have found and interrogate more into each of their biographies. I look forward to sharing the stories we find with you all!

Works cited:

Fowler, Madelin, Roberts, Amy, and Rigney, Lester-Irabinna. “The ‘very stillness of thing’: object biographies of sailcloth and fishing net from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana) colonial archive, South Australia.” World Archaeology, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 210–225, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2016.1195770. 

Gosden, Chris and Marshall, Yvonne. “The cultural biography of objects.” World Archaeology, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 169–178, 1999, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1999.9980439.

Wesley Brock 28′

On October 17, the Department of Anthropology hosted its latest of many community archaeology events. Since the beginning of the Kenyon Archaeological Project in 2023, as is true of increasingly many excavations in the past forty years (Stubbs et al.), community engagement has been a central focus. As both the Anthropology Department office intern and a student in the Campus Archaeology course, I faced an interesting question approaching this semester’s community engagement event: what appeals to people about archaeology?

1. You get to dig in the dirt

Archaeology is a uniquely sensory, immersive practice. On Mondays when my Campus Archaeology class is out at the site all afternoon, I hear constant references to the physicality of our work: “My back hurts,” “My feet are wet,” “The sun is killing me.” The importance of the body to archaeology is one of its most appealing aspects for me. In addition to academic strategies, you go into archaeology with physical strategies — kids at the community archaeology day were reminded to be physically gentle with the ground. Archaeology is tactile — you get to feel the things you’re studying and the earth those things are held within.

2. You get your hands on history

“Get your hands on Kenyon history” was my pseudo-motto for this weekend’s community archaeology day. Just as you get to feel the ground, you feel the processes of time. The past might be out of sight, buried under a lawn you might pass every day, but it’s really only a few inches (or centimeters!) beneath the surface.

The village of Gambier and Kenyon College are remarkable for having a united and well-documented origin story. Stakeholders in Kenyon history are not limited to Kenyon students and faculty; everyone living in Gambier has a deep investment in this origin story. While not everyone knows exactly what is going on with that orange fence outside the church, the fence signals that there is work taking place, and community events signal that the work is a shared work. I have found while working on this project that it takes quite a lot to make people aware of it: students express disbelief that there is anything worth looking at under Kenyon’s well-maintained turf. 

Gambier and Kenyon also have the notable aspect of being small. In addition to investment in the past, we have an investment in each other that the physical work of excavation brings to the surface like any artifact.

In contrast with the idea that students are a central stakeholder group in campus archaeology projects (Kroot & Panich), not many students uninvolved with the Campus Archaeology course attended the event. However, there was steady attendance from other community members. Kids got quite invested and enjoyed using picks to look for ceramic pieces, rusty spoons, skinny nails, and interesting rocks. I asked why they thought there were so many nails. “Because there was a house here,” said 7-year-old Ava. A decisive start to her academic career.

Kroot, Matthew, and Lee M. Panich. 2020. “Students Are Stakeholders in On-Campus Archaeology.” Advances in Archaeological Practice: A Journal of the Society of American Archaeology 8 (2): 134–50.

Stubbs, John D., Patricia Capone, Christina J. Hodge, and Diana D. Loren. 2010. “Campus Archaeology/Public Archaeology at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.” In Beneath the Ivory Tower: The Archaeology of Academia, edited by Russell K. Skowronek and Kenneth E. Lewis, 99-120. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Hannah Dunn-Helton, ‘27

On the morning of Saturday, October 17th, Kenyon students, their families, community members, and elementary schoolers braved the cold weather to pick up their trowels and search for a piece of Kenyon’s history as part of Community Archaeology Day at the Bishop’s Cabin site. I spent the day with a group of elementary school students in a shallow unit known as sub op L, all of whom were quite enthusiastic about getting dirty, searching for treasure, and
discovering history. We worked diligently to excavate as much as we could. Several of the boys took the opportunity to mine for gold like they would in the video game Minecraft, turning ordinary rocks into valuable finds. One young girl explained to me her theory that zombies lived underneath the ground at the college and we were unearthing a portion of their city.

As I excavated with the kids, the rest of the site filled up with people. There were, of course, the kids’ parents, some of whom were Kenyon professors and others of whom lived in Gambier and Mount Vernon. Community Archaeology Day aligned with Kenyon’s Family Weekend, so visiting families poured in to find out what was behind the fence. Curious students also stopped by to discover what they passed on their way to class every day. Throughout the
site, campus archaeology students guided visiting community members through basic archaeological procedures and discussed the history of the site and the artifacts discovered there. Visitors then began excavating themselves. They were excited to see pieces of history emerge from the ground in front of them, dusting the artifacts off and handing them around so everyone could see the treasure that had been discovered.

Seeing so many people participate in the excavation helped me to appreciate the diversity of Kenyon’s community. It makes sense that the faculty, students, and staff at Kenyon are considered part of the community. Yet the village of Gambier, Mount Vernon, parents and families, and alumni are all part of Kenyon’s community as well. Community is not always an easy concept for archaeologists to define. There are some situations, such as when working
with Indigenous groups, when identifying specific communities becomes very important. On a project like this, however, community is much more expansive. Kenyon has meant a great deal of things to a great many people over the years. Archaeologists learn from the perspectives of the local community on the site. The community learns their place in and relationship to the history the excavation reveals. The Kenyon Archaeological Project is working to include as
many members of the community as possible in our project through as many methods as possible. As we dug for the buried treasure of the Kenyon community’s past, a fifth grader told me that he couldn’t believe there was so much history in his hometown. He was excited to discover more. Such little moments of connection between the community and the history that makes the community is truly what archaeology is all about.

by Clemmie Anzalone 27′

Historical Archaeology

In order to get the most comprehensive look possible when approaching things archaeologically, we need to consider a variety of sources. Just as it would be unwise and unproductive to go into a dig not knowing how to do the technical work of archaeology, approaching a dig with as much background information and context as possible is incredibly important. Historical archaeology makes up both of these categories, as it focuses on the material remains of history. This can mean anything from physical objects like textiles or ceramics, as well as written records of the past. This is a practice that began very recently, most formally in the 1960s. (Orser, Charles E. “Historical Archaeology | Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology | Oxford Academic.” Oxford Academic, March 29, 2019. https://academic.oup.com/reference/62334/reference-article-abstract/561705044?redirectedFrom=fulltext.) As archaeology and anthropology have become more interdisciplinary in recent years, historical archaeology has become much more commonplace. 

For our first class of the semester, before we even got onto the dig site, we started by looking at some materials having to do with the history of Kenyon overall. We looked through various class and student directories, as well as some letters sent to and from the college in the 19th century. These firsthand documents helped to humanize past students and made their lives much more tangible to me. While finding objects alone is exciting and helps us to understand the everyday life of past people, having the right context surrounding this is what makes the information important. Recently, we have been finding lots of bones in our dig. As I have learned which bones belong to pigs and which belong to cows, I am able to imagine the kinds of meals the people living here would have been eating. While I’m sure I could have figured out where these bones came from eventually if I dug them up with no context, having the background information that the college was largely self-sufficient at its founding and animals like pigs and cows lived on campus, information I got from our day of research in the archives before excavating, I am able to paint a much richer picture of the past. 

We also found a piece of a pipe in my sub-op in the dig. This has been one of the more interesting finds for me because it tells us something about the habits of the people living here. We can say with certainty that any person who lived at Kenyon in the 19th century ate something, but a pipe tells us more about what they spent their time doing outside of what is needed to survive. It fills in the context we do not get from official documents.

Orser, Charles E. “Historical Archaeology | Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology | Oxford Academic.” Oxford Academic, March 29, 2019. https://academic.oup.com/reference/62334/reference-article-abstract/561705044?redirectedFrom=fulltext.