Digging Dartmouth: Community Archaeology at an 18th Century House Site on the Dartmouth Green

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Public Archaeology in New Hampshire: Museum and University Research" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper presents initial results of a campus archaeological project at Dartmouth College, founded in 1769 in Hanover, NH. As part of Dartmouth’s 250th anniversary, we began a historic mapping effort to locate 18th century house sites, and then worked with students enrolled in relevant courses to conduct magnetometry and GPR surveys over these areas. Geophysics revealed a feature consistent with a large privy, located behind a house constructed in 1786 by Silvanus Ripley and Abigail Wheelock. Excavations targeting this feature took place over graduation and alumni weeks, with community, alumni, and student volunteers, along with poster and artifact displays for the many visitors to campus. We successfully located the stone-built privy and excavated a sequence of in-tact deposits containing thousands of artifacts dating from the 1780s-1890s, revealing insights into the lifeways of early Dartmouth residents, and casting new light on questions of gender, class, and daily practice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Public Archaeology in New Hampshire: Museum and University Research   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 459