In the summer of 2018, an archaeology field school conducted four weeks of excavation on the property of the Wylie House Museum, the 1835 home of the first president of Indiana University on the Bloomington campus. The students in the course dug four features within a twenty square meter area in search of the Wylie family’s 19th century subterranean cold-frame greenhouses. These buried garden pits, as the family called them, are identified in a variety of family artifacts, from a couple of early photographs to a grandson’s memory map of the property and an 1888 school writing piece.
Research into the Wylie archival collections led the museum director and university archaeologists to propose a multi-year, grant-funded project that includes both physical and online exhibits, historic archaeology courses, community archaeology experiences, and a symposium to encourage campus archaeologists across the state to conduct archaeology projects in conjunction with campus archivists, librarians, and historians.
This session will provide attendees with an overview of the project from the perspective of both the museum director and the doctoral archaeology student that led the field school. Presenters will discuss the ways in which this project allowed archaeologists and archivists to work together, learn from each other, and provide students and community members with unique learning experiences. Attendees will learn how the archival documents were key to this project's student experience, cross-campus collaboration, and project funding.
