Overview

Introduction

The Wellesley College Hall Archaeology Project (WCHAP) incorporates digital engagement strategies to facilitate undergraduate participation in our community-based historical excavation. While building our research plan for exploring the site of a women’s dormitory fire that occurred in 1914, community members were invited to share their perspectives. This iterative process is meant to build inclusive conversations about how today’s diverse community reflects on differences and continuities with a privileged past. Here, we outline our team's efforts and results and share strategies that were successful for our excavation and can be extended to a diversity of other community-based archaeology projects.

In Fall 2017, Summer 2018, Fall 2018, Summer 2019, Fall 2019, and Fall 2022 undergraduate students at Wellesley College have conducted excavations on campus at the site of the historical College Hall fire. To date, over 100 students and community volunteers have participated in the excavation, and another 50 students have participated in exhibition curation and outreach. The initial goal of this excavation was to provide students with an experiential learning opportunity in their own backyard, in part to be inclusive of students who may otherwise not have the resources or directed interest to pursue international fieldwork opportunities. The Project Director, faculty member Elizabeth Minor, structured the excavation to promote community input and participation in the research process. Community-based participatory research has become a crucial movement towards overcoming inequity in archaeological research, especially in giving agency to indigenous and descendant groups in the process of interpreting their own pasts. In the case of this created college community, students expressed concern about how their lived experiences, which reflect increasingly diverse backgrounds, relate to the historical realities of an elite private college. With input from current students and alumnae, it became clear that by exploring a ‘frozen’ moment in time from a century ago, the contemporary community would be able build self-reflexive dialogues that explore the tensions between an inclusive present and an exclusive past.

The Wellesley College Hall Archaeology Project

From the on-campus Wellesley College Hall Archaeology Project excavations, the students found many artifacts from the fire, some of which were burnt past recognition. Students explore how these fragments fit into the context of the former College Hall and use them to investigate the magnitude of the fire. This new information surrounding the fire can provide more insight into the experiences of the Wellesley College community during and directly after the fire. Archaeological research into homosocial environments has largely been focused on men-centered spaces, and less frequently on women-centered spaces. A question that permeates our research is if and how the archaeological remains will reflect the gendered nature of the space.

College Hall was one of the first buildings at Wellesley College, as it was built for the college’s opening in 1875. The building was 475 feet in length and rose four stories, with five-story towers. It formed the heart of the college during its early years, as it was originally the College’s only building. It included administrative offices, student housing, and classrooms. Early on March 17th, 1914, a fire started in the building and it burned down in four hours (Lefkowitz Horowitz 2014, Scanlon Moglov 2014). The students remained calm and everyone exited the building safely; no human lives were lost in this incident. Once everyone was accounted for, the attention of the community turned to rescuing items from the hall. The community was able to save some of the academic records of the current and former students at Wellesley, but many documents were lost. The students made a fire brigade line, extending from the front of College Hall to the new Library, to rescue many books and papers from the building. But, in the end, the firefighters could not save the building from the fire and College Hall burned down to the ground overnight (Lefkowitz Horowitz 2014, Scanlon Moglov 2014). One workman stated “[t]hose girls even had the [fire] hose on, and if there had been any pressure they wouldn’t have needed help from outside” (Wellesley News 1914). Because of the brave efforts of the students and staff in recovering objects from the fire and the fact that the fire destroyed anything not removed, the excavation has primarily found charred fragments of items from the fire.

The first season of excavations of the site of College Hall was conducted in Fall 2017 by Minor’s Introduction to Archaeology class and other volunteer undergraduate anthropology students. We chose where to dig by comparing an overlay of the old College Hall to the current Wellesley landscape. We began with two one-by-one-meter test units by Claflin Hall and two one-by-one-meter test units in Tower Courtyard, as they were near places in College Hall that were thought to have potential for concentrated finds. For example, we chose the unit in the middle of Tower Courtyard because that was where the center atrium of College Hall was located. The second season of excavation took place in June 2018 with the Archaeology of Wellesley field school and significant volunteer help from students, staff, and other faculty. We finished excavation in the first courtyard test unit and opened two new one-by-one-meter test units on the top of Severance Hill as suggested by crowdsourced community input. The concentration of fire debris in that area has led to subsequent seasons concentrating on Severance Hill (Fall 2018, Summer 2019, Fall 2019).

Classifying finds as those associated with the fire versus those that were deposited later has provided an interesting sequence of daily life activities over time. Many of the finds found in the upper loci were not from the fire, but were modern materials deposited by current students, including candy wrappers, cigarette butts, beer bottle caps, ice cream wrappers, and a bright pink golf tee. Fire deposition layers were immediately identifiable at depths between 30-50 cms below surface due to the high concentration of ash, charcoal, and melted glass. Historical artifacts from College Hall include large amounts of bricks, square iron nails, masses of melted glass, anthracite coal, bronze attachments, and ceramic dishware sherds and pipe fittings. Notable finds include small fragments from a human anatomical specimen, ancient ceramic sherds from the Mediterranean and Near East, melted glassware and scientific laboratory equipment, fossilized clams, and mineral samples including a copper nugget, geodes, a large kyanite crystal, strontianite crystals, and scoria. These finds are likely from the natural history museum, teaching collections, and classrooms located in the upper levels of College Hall. Fragments from the building and furnishings include a granite casing stone, a small worked piece of marble likely from a sculpture, an ornate lock plate and drawer pull, and an in situ cistern that may be part of President Pendleton’s personal lavatory based on building plans. No identifiable fragments of personal items from the time of the fire have yet been recovered, aside from three buttons and a tiny scrap of red cloth, perhaps due to the fact the majority of dorm rooms were on lower levels and may be deeper than we have yet reached. The artifact that has perhaps garnered the most student interest is a sardine can and key, which could represent a late night snack snuck in against the dormitory rules. The community response is generally of excitement at finding material evidence of a rule-breaker, demonstrating archaeology’s key value as a record of what “really” happened outside of official narratives. Student excavators celebrated this favorite find by trying sardines on the pizza from the end of season party for Fall 2019, to very mixed reviews.

Reflecting on Community-Based Archaeology at Wellesley

The Wellesley College Hall Archaeology Project has evolved over the course of its first five years, especially after the hiatus of remote teaching in 2020. The methods that we use to share our research outcomes and bring in new input from connected audiences are ultimately in service of the foundational goal of the project to build dialogues of inclusiveness. All students who participate in the excavation are asked to reflect on their experiences and to contribute advice for those who participate in the future. The reflections presented here stem from our particular set of admittedly privileged circumstances—at a liberal arts/women’s college—but have the potential to offer suggestions of how to use community-based archaeology to address issues of inclusion and give other community groups the agency to direct the construction of their own historical narratives. In particular, the digital strategies used in this project can connect dispersed communities and decentralize the process of knowledge production.

As we successfully reach the level of the 1914 fire, we begin to have new evidence about the lives of students a century ago. The college community has tasked us with participating in major conversations about multi-faceted personal identities, and we have some contributions to make at this time. The scientific equipment and specimen fragments uncovered in the excavation speak to the serious nature of academics at the college, an area of daily life with which many respondents sought connection. One of the only domestic-related finds, a sardine can and key, is significant because it could demonstrate some rule-breaking on behalf of the Wellesley students of 1914, as food was not allowed in the dorms. The sardine can was one of the student excavators’ favorite finds because it shines a fun light on the students from the pictures of that era, who otherwise look very serious and stoic when they pose for the camera. Three coins were found at the top of Severance Hill right next to each other, which probably fell out of a student’s pocket when they were sledding down the hill sometime after 1975 (based on their dates)—they offer a snapshot of life up to 40 years ago that is charmingly similar to life at the College today. These and other artifacts were researched and curated by a new cohort of students, who displayed them next to belongings collected from current students (with permission), and objects designed to imagine what life will be like another one hundred years from now. Students picked from the research themes gathered through WCHAP surveys and used the objects to address them in the public exhibit.

Student participant self-reflection centers on themes of bridging a sense of distance and connection with the past, especially with feelings of belonging to an evolving community. Other students found that exploring the tension with problematic histories helped themselves find a place of belonging in their current community. Many students saw the process of engaging with others as adding to our understandings of the past as well as building connections within the current community.

Current fieldwork in the Fall 2022 season includes a series of creative public outreach events that seek to reconnect community members after our remote learning hiatus. Students are creating QR code fliers that will lead players on a scavenger hunt throughout campus, and on an accompanying ArcGIS StoryMap. A mini dig kit will be used by students to test out excavation and to get a hands on appreciation for discovering objects. A series of ephemeral installations in leaves and gatherings will explore the outline of the former College Hall upon the current landscape. As we backfill the excavation, a community time capsule will be left for future explorations of our current pasts. And students will have the chance to experience the types of fun sought out in 1914 at the College Hall Hop party, held in one of the buildings that replaced the original home of Wellesley College.

For more information, see Minor, E., P. Favela, M. Morris, G. Oppenheim, and R. Tao. 2022. “Digital Engagement Strategies for Community Based Archaeology: Crowdsourcing Excavation Planning and Gamification to Share Research Results for the Wellesley College Hall Archaeology Project,” in E. Watrall and L. Goldstein (eds.), Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice, University Press Florida, pp. 87-124.