Learning by Doing with "I Dig UCI": Campus Archaeology for an Unclaimed Space

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "At Stake in the Quad: Archaeologies on/of Campus", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Prior to William Pereira’s grand architectural interventions in higher education, the land that would become the UCI campus housed an outpost of the Irvine Ranch operations. Colloquially known as “The Farm,” this area’s incorporation as part of the campus has served as an interim space. This paper details the design and implementation of a fieldwork-based course entitled “I DIG UCI” in which students explore how this space offers intervenes in the totalizing forms of land development embodied by the broader Irvine "Master Plan." At stake is whether such archaeological engagements with the site signal its fixity as a locus of heritage, or affirm its interim nature as a non-regularized space on a public university campus. At what point do ruins simply need to be dealt with? For students in the course, their participation - learning by doing - allows them to evaluate the role archaeology plays in negotiating that terrain.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• At Stake in the Quad: Archaeologies on/of Campus

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow