Origins of the Campus Archaeology Program and the First Field School
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Campus as laboratory an oral history of MSU’s campus archaeology program with Lynne Goldstein. My name is Alice Lynn McMichael, I am the assistant director of LEADR, the Lab for Education and Advancement of Digital Research at Michigan State University. I’m Autumn Painter, a Ph.D student in the Department of Anthropology and the current campus archaeologist.
This project is a series of interviews with Professor Lynne Goldstein, recorded on the occasion of her retirement from MSU’s Department of Anthropology in 2018. She was the founder and director of the campus archaeology program. She is now professor emeritus of anthropology. These interviews were recorded in LEADR in April of 2018.
This is chapter one part one of the oral history. We discuss origins of the Campus Archaeology Program and the 1st field school. It was reported on April 9th 2018. So Dr Goldstein thank you so much for agreeing to record this oral history of the program. I was wondering if you can tell us to start with a little bit about the origins or the beginnings of campus archaeology here at MSU.
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Okay, the archaeology at MSU has a problem that almost every other Department of Anthropology has and that is that the random student, the people on the street the general public have no idea that archaeology is under anthropology. And so you can talk to somebody and they’ll say to you a student or general public they’ll say it’s really too bad that I miss you doesn’t have archaeology and it becomes a very frustrating thing.
And I came here as chair of the Department of Anthropology and in 2005 the university celebrated its sesquicentennial. And prior to that, the provost who at the time was Lou Anna Simon, the provost asked that all department chairs that every department in the university come up with something for the sesquicentennial.
And I sat and thought about what we could do as an Anthropology Department and frankly I didn’t have a lot of ideas but then I thought you know one of the things we could do is wouldn’t be cool to have current students dig up former students not bodies but you know do excavations.
And I knew that next to the MSU Museum was where the 1st dormitory was, known as saints rest. And so, Bill Lovis pointed out to me that you could, that at certain times of the year, again depending on moisture you could actually see the outline of the building if you were up in the 3rd floor of the museum looking out.
And so we were pretty sure there was something there. So I wrote a proposal for us to do that. Now I had not intended for me to do it, I had intended for Ken Lewis, a historical archaeologist, to do it, and in fact it was going to be a joint field school that he and Jodie Gorman were going to run and that I would do all the background stuff. I would do all the administrative work. I would, you know, interact with the administration, get permissions, do all that stuff and they would run the field school. And at one point Bill Lovis was also going to be involved in it. Well, that sort of all fell apart to some degree.
Technically, Jodie and… Well, let me back up. Because, so, I wrote a proposal because there was money available. I wrote a proposal. The Provost was really excited about it, and she told me this was a great idea, this is going to be terrific, etc., etc., etc. And then I heard nothing.
That was in November and I heard 0. In December, late December, I got a phone call from a person who was head of planning in what is now IPF [Infrastructure Planning and Facilities]. and he said to me, he said, uh, “I know you proposed to do this”. He said, “I just want you to know that I stopped it and you’re not going to get funding and you’re not going to be able to do this”. And I said, “Why, why do you care”? And he said, “Well, you’re going to hurt trees”. And I said, “I’m not going to hurt trees. The people who take care of the trees are behind us and, you know, we’re not, we know how to work around trees and we’re not going to hurt anything”.
He said, “Well, I just think it’s too destructive and you shouldn’t be doing this and there’s no need and you’re not going to learn anything. There’s nothing there”. I said, “Well, I differ”. He said, “Well, you can’t do it”. And that was it. Then, January came around and in January there was an announcement that the Board of Trustees had named Lou Anna Simon to be president of the university.
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So mid-January I got another phone call from the same person who said, “I can’t stop you now”. And he said, “You know, since Lou Anna is president, you know, you’re going to be able to do this. I can’t say no”. Or, “my no doesn’t count”. So I said, “Great”. And, so she thought it was great idea and so we did the field school. And technically, well, we did a lot of research. We had a lot of students and a lot of us. Everybody was doing research on the building and on the early campus and everything else. So, we knew that we were going to–we were in a prime location for visibility and we knew that this was supposed to be a sesquicentennial project, so we really wanted it to be flashy.
And we worked with IPF to get fencing, chain link fencing, put around where we were going to dig so it would be secure and they did all kinds of stuff for us. They just went, went way out of their way to help us and they have since too.
But, they did all of this stuff and, and we started and, of course, we immediately hit something because the building is only this much below the surface [gesturing depth]. I mean not very far at all. Not even a foot. And, so — if you hit a wall especially – so, it was, it was great.
And then there was the other thing: he was worried we would hurt a sidewalk. Well, we’re not capable of removing a sidewalk, so that was kind of a dumb thing. But, anyway, we started working, we started finding stuff, and it was, it was amazing. And the president — the now new president — President Simon was really interested in archaeology, a lot, and she really liked this whole idea. And so she would come — one of her habits was to walk to meetings. She never — she rarely drove to a meeting or had somebody drive her to a meeting. She liked to walk around the campus and interact with people and stuff, and so she would visit on a regular basis.
And she, you know – and we had trained the students – Okay, so now let’s move to the student part. We had trained the students very, very well in terms of what they were going to be doing. We explained they were going to be in a fishbowl, basically. And that, we bought them — and I think it was because the money wasn’t, didn’t go far enough. This became a problem. We bought them each, I think, four T- shirts, but they really needed 5, right? So there was a little scrambling there. But, anyway, we bought them. They had to wear the T-shirts. T-shirts were dark green and they had a quote on the back and they were quite lovely. Anyway, I’m sure we have some around still. And those t-shirts identified people as crew members.
And, then, we also — the other thing we did is we really tried to incorporate archives as much as possible. So, on the chain link fence, we had signs that we hung every day. We had pictures of what the building looked like, we had description of what we were doing, we had all kinds of little blurbs from the archives and various other sorts of things so that even if we weren’t there — well, if we weren’t there, the signs weren’t up – but, if people were busy, you still could walk around and understand something of what was going on.
And, and so we had the list of the rules for the dormitory. And, and one of the things that people liked was in the first week we found evidence that virtually every rule had been broken. But, of course, that makes sense. I mean, why would you have a rule that wasn’t an issue? I mean, you know, you’re not going to have a rule: don’t murder people, if, I mean, that’s not generally an issue, you know, on a campus. That could be obviously, but that’s not a general dorm rule. So that made sense to us.
Anyway, so we had all of that and we had lots and lots of people who visited, lots and lots of people. And, the. all of the maintenance people came out regularly. I mean, everybody was there all the time. It was very busy. So what ended up happening is, is that Jodie and Ken did the direction of the, the field school, for the most part. I was there every day, for at least some large chunk of the day, and I handled all of the people. Now the students also had to handle the people. Well, we asked – every day we assigned 2 different students to be, you know, tour guides. And so they would – we usually let people come in as long as they were with us and – because, it was very dangerous because we have very deep holes. And so — because we went all the way down to the bottom of the basement – so it was, it was deep. And so we, so we asked people that they, you know, follow us.
And so we gave, the students gave tours, I dealt with all the university people, and the students had been trained to be very careful about what they said. We didn’t want people — we didn’t want a student like jumping up and saying, “We have found so many cool artifacts,” because we were in a public place and we were really worried about stealing or, you know. We just had no clue how protected we were. So, we trained them, you know, to say, “Oh, we’re finding things”, you know, “But they may not be too exciting to you, but there are exciting to us”, you know.
And so one day when I missed her, the president came and asked this one student how she was doing. She was in this very deep and, you know, “What are you doing?” And so the student said, “I haven’t found anything.” [laughter] “I haven’t found anything. No, nothing.” It’s really, you know, and so she, the president, came up to me and said “Why is this poor young woman over there in this deep hole finding nothing?”
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ALM: One question I have is how many students were involved in this 1st field school.
LG: About 15.
ALM: Were they all undergrads?
LG: Yes. Yes, we had a couple students who acted as supervisors who were graduate students, but they were under — they were all undergrads.
So here’s what happened — this is a really interesting part of the story that a lot of people don’t know about and that is that the students — we were finding — what had happened is the building had burned down and what they did is they moved a lot of stuff, but they also pushed in the bricks, you know. So they were, they were it was just rubble. So these are bricks that don’t have a context — they have a context but they’re not in situ, right? So, what do you do with those?
And so that became a problem, because we’re talking thousands. And the president one day said to me, “I would like to sell these bricks.” And I said, “Oh, no, no. We can’t sell them. That’s not possible, because then people won’t understand that there’s a difference and, you know, that’s unethical.” And so, you know, she got kind of testy about it and said, “Well, you know there are our bricks. [laughter] We should be able to sell.”
And I said — so finally what ended up happening is they agreed that what they would do is give the bricks to people for certain amounts of money donated. Because this was, there was a capital campaign going on. So we agreed to that. So the bricks were removed on a regular basis. We would pile them up and they were removed and they’re in a secret place, which I know about and the president knows about and one other person and that’s it. They’re hidden in that place and they have been doled out, I think, I don’t even know, to various people over time.
So, the students got upset. Not about, you know, giving bricks to rich people or whatever, but they were — they said — they came to me and said, “Hey. We’re doing all this work to get these bricks out. If the university is going to get money because of these bricks, then the money should go to archaeology students.”
And I said, “Well, you know, that’s a really interesting issue.” And I said — and they said, “We, we” — you know, and they felt very strongly about it, you know, and sort of organized and stuff. And I said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to write a letter to the president telling her what your issue is and what you want to happen and I will deliver it to her.”
So they wrote this very lovely letter and, which I’m sure I have someplace, a copy of, and she –and I took it over to her, terrified. Well, but when she when she came over to visit one day, I said, “I have to warn you that the students are writing you a petition”, and she said, “For what?” And then I explained and she said, “Okay, fine.” And so I delivered the letter to her, and what she did, she, 1st of all, sort of decreed that every student should get a brick. And she then had made, for each student, a brass plate that could be put on the brick that said Saints rest 2005, you know, MSU excavations or I can’t remember exactly what it said. So she had that was made up.
And then she said that although she didn’t want to enter into the problem of book keeping bricks and money and where it was going and doing it on a yearly basis and so on, that she would agree to provide funds for a scholarship for undergraduates who were in the field school. So that was how it all got settled at. That later morphed into something else but that was that was the agreement.
So there was that and then there was so much publicity. We were in the Chicago Tribune. We were on every T.V. station. We were — there was a full page article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was just, it was amazing.
The other thing we did is that, since we knew the building burned down and we actually found, we think, the area of the building where they were working on when it didn’t burn down. What we did, once we had the whole thing opened as much as we were going to open, I had the East Lansing Fire Department come to try to figure out where the fire started.
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And so they did. So that was interesting for the students as well and, then, we did that.
AP: I am trying to remember, the mortar that was found with the name on it..
LG: That has nothing to do that. That’s not Saints Rest.
ALM: Did the fire department find anything?
LG: Well, yes. They did. They did agree that the fire likely started the way we thought it had started which was — it was over Christmas break so there were no students around — and what had happened was, they were working on fixing the building, which was a continuous thing. and when they left for the day, they probably didn’t tamp down the fire where they were working. You know, they had a little fire going for light and heat and stuff, and they probably didn’t totally tamp it down, and that’s where the fire started.
So, that was interesting as well. And, just, we had just a whole variety of things. We had botany people and the plant, you, plant people come out. We had everybody coming out. We had historians coming out to talk about — at the time Keith Ritter was working on his history of MSU and so he came out regularly and he gave lectures. We had lectures, I think, 2 or 3 times a week at lunch.
I still do that on field schools but not that, to that extent. I mean, but we just had so much going on, so many things that we were finding, so many things we were doing, and so many people who were coming to visit, that it was pretty easy to schedule a half hour lecture.
ALM: Were these lectures for the students in the field school or the public?
LG: For the students in the field school. And so we would, at lunch, we would sit and, you know, they would eat and then we’d take about a half an hour for whatever talk this was, you know, somebody would sit on a bucket give talk.