This is our fourth season
of excavating in the yard.
Every two years, staff
from the Peabody Museum,
along with the Department of
Anthropology and our partners
in Harvard University Native
American Program, we come out,
and we excavate the yard,
looking for material evidence
of colonial Harvard.
As we see the yard now, it's
a 19th century landscape.
And we're looking back
deeper into that past
at the 18th and 17th century.
Students excavate,
and the artifacts
that they recover then become
part of the Peabody Museum's
collection.
This is the bottom of a pipe.
And we could tell how old it
is by measuring the bore hole.
As we look in archaeology,
we have the remnants
of what they actually did.
They're trash, basically,
of everyday life.
It's a medium-sized piece
of 20th century porcelain.
And it has this gold
ribbon right here.
Students have curated
an exhibit that
uses material
objects, what we found
in the archaeological
record here at Harvard Yard,
alongside information
that they've gleaned
from the documentary
and visual record
to pull together a different
story about Harvard.
One of the themes that the
students chose to draw from
was rule-breaking
So students noted,
as they were excavating in the
yard, all of the pipe stems
and wine bottles that
they're coming across.
And they're looking at the
written record that says,
smoking and drinking's
not allowed.
So that's one clear disparity.
And looking at the
college laws of 1734,
there's a note in
the college law
that you're not allowed
to wear powdered wigs,
as was the fashion in most
of Boston and Cambridge
at the time.
But students were prohibited
from wearing powdered wigs.
However, we go to
the excavations.
What we found are
wig curlers, which
are the evidence that people
were actually wearing wigs
while they were
prohibited from doing so.
What did you find?
Sandwich Glass Factory.
Possibly.
Yeah?
Mhm.
Or Boston glass.
This is hard, physical labor.
And as the students
are digging, you'll
see that they're stopping
and pulling out material.
They're going through screens,
and picking out artifacts.
And in fact, what you
find in the exhibition
is only a small
percentage of what
we've recovered from the field.
Last field season, there
were over 10,000 objects.
They're quite small,
but 10,000 objects
that we recovered that become
part of the Peabody Museum's
collection.
If you look at the exhibit,
it's just a percentage of that.
