Archaeology of College Hill, Brown University, Providence, RI (2026)

10/11/2026

Hello!! This is Claire and Johnson with the first Instagram post for Archaeology of College Hill! This year we are continuing efforts from the previous year of excavating the List Art site. 🪏

Last week, we worked on cleaning up LAB02. Previously, LAB02 had a mix of top soil and a lower sand layer (that looked awfully similar to peanut butter), but we were able to completely remove the topsoil to expose the sand one! Using hand trowels and pickaxes, we were also able to expose certain cuts filled with grayer dirt.

From our digging, we have mainly found brick, glass, nails, and ceramic pieces. Some of the brick and glass pieces have lettering! Two exciting finds so far have been half of a small button found in LAB02 and a rusted quarter in LAB01. But the most exciting find that we wanted to share was an old Narragansett b**r can from LAB06 last week 🍺 — super cool!! There have also been a lot of old pull tabs found as well. We can’t wait to take these artifacts into the lab and date them, and get a better sense of the history behind the site (perhaps a Brown student threw a party in the 1970s 👀).

As we find items through excavation, we have been learning about how to record and label these items. Once we find an item, we proceed to bag it and record information in the iPads as well as our personal field journals. Our bags are in the categories of glass, slate, plastic, metal, and ceramic. The multiple forms of recording allows us to ensure that when we examine the items more carefully later in the lab, that there are no anomalies or mismatches in information. This way if there’s missing info, we’ll have another record to fill us in!

Over the weekend, Nor’Easter hit the Providence area and our trenches were affected as a result. The heavy rain made it difficult to clean up the top soil layer in certain areas, and also transported material to different contexts of the trench. However, we were able to minimize most of the impact from the rain by covering the trenches with a tarp! This week we also noticed there were many many fat worms possibly because of the rain 🪱!

We also learned how to 3D scan our trench this week! Using Polycam, we were able to use the LiDar scanner on our iPads to capture the context of the sand “peanut butter layer” before moving on to lower contexts.

Archeology Term of the week: Context 📍
Context is the precise physical, spatial, and temporal location where an artifact, ecofact, or feature is found. Specifically in this class, we mark a new context we reach a new layer or deposit. These can be indicated by changes in soil, texture, or color!

Follow us on Instagram to see our weekly updates and learn more about the process of Archeology with us! 🔥

11/18/2025

Hi! This is Angela and Manolo providing updates from week 11 of Archaeology of College Hill. This week we learned a ton about analyzing and interpreting material culture and began analyzing the material collected from the List Art Building excavation.

On Tuesday, in class, we participated in the very fun and informative exercise of analyzing trash collected from various different members of the Joukowsky Institute and seeing how much we could gather about their lives. The exercise provided many valuable lessons about the interpretation of material culture (objects people used in their daily lives). One particularly important lesson was understanding that many different interpretations can be had of the same collection of material. We also learned that things are not always as they seem, and our assumptions about people’s lives are often incorrect. These lessons were incredibly valuable as we transitioned to the lab on Wednesday to analyze the material collected from the site.

During lab on Wednesday, half the class began sorting, weighing, and cataloging bricks, glass, ceramics, and miscellaneous objects. Those studying the bricks identified pieces with at least one flat surface to keep before discarding those with no surfaces. Next, they counted and weighed the bricks for each trench and context. Meanwhile, the other half of the class analyzed their assigned artifacts for their Object Biographies and Final Projects. Part of the analysis involved conducting Google searches for comparandum which are objects that look similar to the artifact. A classmate was able to find an eBay listing of the exact bottle they were studying. Using the information from the listing of the comparandum, we can better approximate the age and function of our bottle.

We’re super excited to finish up our Object Biographies and present to our fellow classmates in week 12!

11/14/2025

Hey! This is Genevieve and Suraj with the weekly update for the List Art Building excavation.

Last week marked the end of our excavation for the semester. We used this week’s classroom time to take the closing pictures for each of the three trenches, along with our final measurements and observations. Along with this, we used a new piece of software to generate 3D models of each trench. We spent quite a bit of time closing the trenches, exemplifying the importance of maintaining a detailed written and digital record of all the work we have done this semester, so it is easy for us to recap our progress for ourselves, future archaeologists working on the site, and for interested members of the public.

Moving forward, our weekly Wednesday excavations will transition to lab time, during which we will focus on cleaning and analyzing our finds. In our first lab session, we were divided into groups and assigned one of the three trenches. Each group received all the artifacts from its respective trench and was tasked with sorting them into two categories: objects that could be washed with water (ceramics, bricks, and glass) and those that should not get wet (metal, textiles, and soft plastics).

We were then provided with buckets of water and toothbrushes to begin cleaning the artifacts that were safe to wash. All cleaned objects were placed on wire racks to dry over the following week, so we can start categorizing them in the next class. For the artifacts that couldn't be washed, we used dry toothbrushes and wire brushes specifically designed for removing rust from metal.

It was an extremely productive day; all artifacts from each trench were cleaned, and we had a great time learning new techniques and processes in archaeology.

11/07/2025

Some spooky updates from College Hill from our last week of excavation this semester!

11/04/2025

Hi there! Ian and Olivia here, sharing a recap of Community Archaeology Day!

Community Archaeology Day was held on Saturday, October 18, and was an amazing chance to invite members of the College Hill and Brown University community to participate in the excavation. Members of the community spent time in LAB01, LAB02, and LAB05 alongside students from the Archaeology of College Hill course. They learned about how to use a trowel, sieve through dirt, and identify different materials and artifacts. With participants ranging from young children to the parents of current Brown University students, it was an fun opportunity for people of all backgrounds to connect via archaeology. Participants found lots of small glass pieces, ceramic sherds, bricks chunks, and rusted iron. These were found in all of the trenches, with the most glass and ceramic coming from LAB02.

We students also had the chance to share what we’ve learned about the site, including the residence at 58 College Street and the later construction of the List Art Building. The residence was first constructed in the 1840s as a simple wooden home. By the early 20th century, the home had undergone expansions to the northern side of the house. It was rented out to Brown University students and housed several businesses. Eventually, it was torn down for the construction of the List Art Building.

The List Art Building, home to the History of Art & Architecture department, Visual Arts department, and the David Winton Bell Gallery, was designed by American architect Philip Johnson. First funded in 1966, construction was completed in 1971. In Archaeology of College Hill, we dig at the foot of this five-story concrete building in hopes of uncovering evidence of the past residence at 58 College Street.

Address

Brown University
Providence, RI
02912

Website

http://go.brown.edu/archaeology, https://sites.brown.edu/archofcollegehill, http://brown.edu/

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