Sorting Through the Trash of Michigan State’s Spartan City: Preliminary Perspectives on the Materiality of the late Post-war Campus

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond the Classroom: Campus Archaeology and Community Collaboration" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This talk will explore the history of temporary post-World War 2 veteran student and family housing on Michigan State University’s campus through archival documents and archaeological materials. It will consider how material culture recovered from a trash dump with artifacts dating from the early 1940s to late 1960s can be used to date the deposition of the assemblage. Focusing on hotel-wares and glass bottles, this paper engages with studies of the more recent past and seeks to show how artifacts within the trash dump relate to the demolition of temporary housing at MSU. We begin with a discussion of the history of emergency housing erected by the University and follow up with a discussion of the mid-century trash dump inadvertently encountered in 2020. We conclude by presenting data from hotel-ware ceramics and single-use, “one-way containers” that suggests a narrow date of deposition between the late 1950s and the early 1960s.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond the Classroom: Campus Archaeology and Community Collaboration   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology