Artifacts and anecdotes drive unique senior elective

Alaina Crowell

On the foggy Friday morning before spring break, 12 seniors, Anthropology teacher Willard Reed, and I gathered around EL’s town historian, Liz Kuchta, in Niantic’s Stone Church Burial Ground. We met her at the center of the cemetery in an open patch of grass with a few rocks scattered between our six-foot distance. Here, she quickly informed us that this area wasn’t truly an empty patch like we had assumed, as we were standing on top of the oldest plots of the burial ground marked by fieldstones as early as 1719. Instances like this echo one of the biggest themes of the Anthropology class: there is more to everything than meets the eye.

“Anthropology is the study of humankind of the past and present,” said Mr. Reed. The curriculum of the class explores multiple fields within anthropology, such as cultural, physical, and linguistic anthropology in the first half. The second is spent discussing and practicing archaeology. This is when seniors drive themselves or carpool to an off-campus field study for a dig. The class closes by examining their finds in a laboratory setting.

“We use different developments of man to help give us time periods of objects we find. That’s why we look at nails and if they were forged pre-1800s, cut from 1800 to 1900, or wire nails from 1900 to today. We look at types of glass, buttons and other objects to help date our sites. Granite is one of my interests, so I use it to also help date sites,” added Mr. Reed.

Some of Mr. Reed’s most interesting finds throughout the years include two British pennies, a shoe buckle, and a baby cup, all from sites at the Smith-Harris House in Niantic. Senior Robby Bevacqua is most excited to dig, as any Anthropology student should be: “Part of the draw of the class is that we spend so much time on a real dig site, pulling out real artifacts. We are the first group of people to see any objects we dig up since they’ve been buried.” As students dig, they keep a journal complete with any and all observations from the field study. The student with the most complete journal is lucky enough to donate theirs to the owner of the historical site as an official historical record.
This year’s spring semester class is digging at the Oswegatchie Hills Nature Preserve in Niantic. Previous classes found artifacts such as animal teeth and farming equipment, so students and Mr. Reed suspect the site is at an old farmhouse. The most painstaking (and exciting) part is that there is so much more to learn from this spring’s dig. From a distance, Anthropology students may appear to just be digging. In practice, the class is about much more than dirt, rocks, or dust: it is an opportunity for students to live a moment in another lifetime. “[Students] are writing the history of forgotten sites, and also realize that their own little town has history to learn about... Learning can be fun, and it does not always have to happen in a classroom,” said Mr. Reed.