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.