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

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

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.

10/28/2025

🐻
Hello! This is Moe and Sophie with this week’s report for the List Art Building excavation at Brown.
📝
We spent class time this week talking about report writing and publication. While annual reports aren’t always published in flashy journals, they are crucial for documenting the archaeological process and making information accessible to the public. Students from our class will be helping with writing an annual report for College Hill at the end of the semester!
⛏
We both spent time in LAB02 and LAB05. Moe served as the recorder, which involves inputting information into the iPad software. Before devices were readily available, archaeologists hand-wrote everything. iPad software allows for easy tracking of information and helps ensure finds don’t go missing.
🔎
We’ve been digging for several weeks now, so it feels like we’re getting into the groove of excavating. We found several large chunks of brick, nails, ceramic pieces, and part of a glass bottle. The most exciting find so far has been lots of pieces of rubber in LAB05. We’re hopeful that we can figure out how all the rubber pieces fit together. It will be kind of like a puzzle!
♻️
Archaeology of College Hill has raised our awareness of how much gets buried in land. It is concerning to know how much plastic waste we’re finding. It takes hundreds of years to break down. We need to be more consciously thinking about what we’re consuming and how we dispose of it.

10/23/2025

☀Hello from Annabel and Megan! After a week-long hiatus due to rain, we are back and better than ever!

This week, we learned about household archaeology, looking at wide-ranging examples from 18th-century Rhode Island to 4,000 BCE Mesopotamia! The household is the most basic unit of society, and has taken many shapes throughout human history and culture. In class, we discussed the layouts of various homes across history, examining what simple plans can tell us about the lived experience of their inhabitants. For example, we examined a house plan from Pompeii, stuck in time from the moment of Vesuvius’ eruption. From this plan, we attempted to deduce what sorts of activities and interactions would have occurred in this space. We learned from this exercise that spaces are not always what they immediately seem, and people throughout history have used the space they had for a diverse array of activities. For example, in this Pompeian villa, the servants' quarters also served as storage space for amphorae, vessels that would contain foodstuffs such as oil and grain. This served as a poignant reminder that archaeology requires multiple angles of analysis to deduce the history of a place.

In the trenches this week, we continued to find many pieces of brick, glass, and ceramic. The ground was rather wet after this weekend’s Nor’easter, but the fearless students of ARCH 1900 soldiered on. We found many thick sherds of stoneware in various hues (including a diagnostic rim piece), as well as many small sherds of transfer-printed ceramics. Among the special finds this week was a stamped brick, a mysterious coin, and a strange circular object with a hole in the middle (Slide 3). Can you guess what it is?

Answer: It’s a sawed piece of bone! We’re still not sure what it was used for - do you have any
guesses?

10/07/2025

👋Hello! This is Allyson and Nadia with this week’s report for the List Art Building (LAB) excavation happening this semester. This week was less rainy than last week, and we made progress that we’d love to share with you all!

⛏️This week, we both learned about and experienced the complex stratigraphy that comes with city archaeology! “Stratigraphy” refers to the layers of soil and objects left behind as people live and build in an area. Stratigraphy allows archaeologists to ‘relatively date’ an object, meaning that we can sequence objects, without knowing their actual dates. This means that if we find a coin, then dig deeper and find glass in a lower layer, we know that the glass was deposited in the soil earlier than the coin (aka The Law of Superposition). However, since cities are so densely populated, the stratigraphy can become complicated as construction digs up dirt and moves it around. An example of clear stratigraphy is shown on slide 3, where there is a very obvious line between the wet sod on the top and the dry clay underneath.

🍶All the trenches continued finding metal nails, ceramic pieces, bricks, glass, and plastic waste. The most interesting find of the week was a paper milk carton wrapper that still had some imprinted words left on it (Slide 4). Our hope is that when we get back to the lab we can see the words clearer and trace its origins. We are excited to see what else we uncover in the coming weeks!

10/01/2025

Click this link to see our first post of the 2025 excavation season on the class Instagram page! Future posts will appear in full on both Facebook and Instagram.

12/02/2024

☀️Hey it’s Jean and Sarah! This week, we’re back in the lab. Now that daylight savings is in full swing, it gets dark too early for us to continue the dig season. This week’s post writers are both born and raised Angelenos, so we’re certainly not too upset to be inside as it gets chillier.

🧪Our time in the lab looks a little different than what the average person might think lab work looks like. Right now, we’re mostly still cleaning up our finds with toothbrushes. It’s much easier to analyze a clean sherd of pottery than a dirty one.!)

🪥Fun fact besides the trowel, the toothbrush is perhaps one of the most used tools in archaeology!

🫖🪨Personally, my favorite material to clean so far has been ceramic sherds - it’s exciting to actually be able to see the colors and patterns of our finds! In the lab, we finally get the chance to focus on each of our finds individually as we clean them. Something we keep in mind during this process is the composition of the material and how water will affect it (for example, it’s not a good idea to fully submerge our shards of glass) My LEAST favorite material to clean has been coal slag, because dry brushing it creates a lot of dust. Still, it’s a lot less dirt to deal with than we had in the trenches. In the ranking of academic fields that involve blowing dirt out of your nose, archaeology is pretty high up there!

🔎As we work, we’re being very careful to keep track of which context and trench each objects came from, and to keep them in the groups they came in as they dry. Sometimes, we do find finds (ha) that have been accidentally placed in the wrong bag of materials. In addition to preparing the objects for further analysis, this process helps us to check our work in the field. Whether we’re in the trenches or doing lab work in the basement, this class is a great opportunity to connect with the material history under our feet on College Hill!

11/15/2024

Hey Everyone! This is Aarya and Shaurya bringing you some updates for week 10 of Archaeology of College Hill! This is an exciting one as it was our first day in the Lab! We were super excited to start cleaning and analyzing our finds from the site, and we thought we could take you along for the journey!

We started by breaking up into 4 groups and were each assigned the finds from a particular trench at the List Art site. Our goal for today was to start cleaning the excess dirt from all of our finds so that they could be analyzed. Now, we had to be careful here, as the process for cleaning finds differs based on what material you are working with. We don’t want to go dunking a bunch of coal into water! Things like brick, stone, slate, ceramic, and glass can be cleaned wet, but we want to make sure that we only dry-brush textile, coal, metal, bone, and other delicate finds.

As you can see in the images below, we started the wet cleaning, brushing brick, slate, ceramic, and glass with water. This was very exciting as we got a clearer picture of a lot of our finds and were able to see details that we hadn’t seen before. The ceramic sherds looked a lot more impressive now that they were shiny and clean! We also saw that we were able to get more information from our finds once they were clean. In image 7, we see a cleaned piece of brick that looks to have been burnt. This tells us a little more about the trench that it came from. Once we cleaned up our finds, we laid them out on paper towels to dry.

While we weren’t able to clean all of our finds, we did get through a lot of them and were able to see all of our hard work from the trenches in the form of cleaned artifacts which was extremely satisfying. The next step was to lay the cleaned artifacts onto drying racks. We had to ensure that we were super meticulous with our organization and labeling to be able to keep track of each find. This is because an artifact out of context is essentially useless and cannot tell us anything. As you can see in image 12, with each batch of finds, we placed the bag with the label from which it originated. This way, once the artifacts are completely dry and ready for analysis, we will know where they came from and what significance they hold.

While we are very sad to be saying goodbye to our List Art site and to all the fun digs we had, we are also definitely excited to move on to this next, equally important, step of the archaeological process! We will be back next week with more updates on artifact analysis!

Until then, this is Aarya and Shaurya signing out!

10/28/2024

Howdy y’all! This is Philip reporting in for your week 8 updates on the archeology of College Hill. Today we have some SpoOOoky findings just in time for Halloween! 🎃🦴👻

Take a look at the first image, can you identify that find? If my carefully chosen emojis didn’t already give it away, it's a bone! Now, in an archeological dig, finding a bone can either offer you interesting insights into or a massive headache. This is because if you happen upon a human bone you better stop what you’re doing and call the police since there will need to be an investigation. Now, how do we know we found a bone? Well, bones have a hard exterior layer, known as cortical bone, surrounding a porous interior layer, known as cancellous bone. The bone we found is large enough you can identify it based on the channel which would have contained bone marrow. Based on the size and density of the bone, we concluded that the bone was in fact from an animal and continued on with the dig. Whew!
Now, you all may be wondering, how do we go about a day of digging to make these interesting finds? Well to answer that, let me break down 5 key parts of a successful dig.

To start, each group needs to get all their members up to speed on the happenings in the trench. Since we rotate each week, usually only one person worked in the same trench the week before and they are responsible for outlining the goals and updates at the start of the session. Based on the previous week's work, each group sets goals for their dig and plans the best strategy to achieve them. You can see the trench 2 group finishing up their opening photo and devising a strategy for the start of their dig in image 2.

With the plans set in place, the digging begins! Generally speaking, a group will try to work their way across a trench removing a uniform layer of dirt. This way all of the digging can remain in the same context and any changes in soil type can be spotted. You can see in image 3 that trench group 4 was hard at work peeling back an orangish clay-like layer of dirt to reveal a sandy layer underneath. In order to classify a new layer as its own context it is important to determine its boundaries. In this case, the sandy layer spanned the whole trench!

While digging, a lot of dirt needs to be moved. This is where sieving comes into play. Any time a bucket is filled with dirt from the trench, at least two people need to go sieve the dirt and search for any finds which were missed. Most of the time there won’t be anything of note, but it is always important to check! You can see trench group 4 scavenging through the leftover rocks after a sieve in image 4.

Finally, when the dirt is dug and the finds are stored, it is time to share progress updates with the whole class. Each group gets a chance to give an overview of what they hoped to achieve, what they managed to do, and what they considered throughout the process. This is an important part of keeping everyone up to date on any cool new finds and choices being made in all of the different trenches.

Of course, then there is always the clean up!
Have a happy Halloween!! 🎃🎃🎃

10/21/2024

Hi all! This is Ayman and Gabby sharing some week 7 updates from the List Art Building (LAB) site!

Findings:
LAB01 made loads of progress while continuing to explore the large slab of pavement in their trench and found a sherd of white pottery with blue lines looking like tree branches. Its fairly flat shape makes it challenging to determine where it might come from.
LAB02 continued to dig through the northern part of the trench, hoping to uncover a new context that looked more consistent with the other, southern context. There was a lot of debate on the limits of the previous contexts and the differences in soil color. Many glass, slate, and small ceramic pieces were found in the process.
LAB03 is starting to see two clearly different soils dividing their trench and thinks they are about to uncover a new context!
LAB04 discovered lots of sand in part of their trench and were trying to find its extent (possibly coming down on a new context?). Their trench has not produced many finds, but a highlight from Wednesday’s dig includes a piece of terracotta with a brown and black glaze.

Key Terms:
Context (locus or stratigraphic unit): a layer uncovered and defined through excavation representing a distinct moment in time. This could include a deposit or architectural feature, for example. Archaeologists define contexts to reconstruct a timeline of what events took place on the site as well as understand the
site’s formation process and the meaning and relationship between the contexts and artifacts buried within them. Changes in soil texture, color, and inclusions can help differentiate between contexts. Context can also be used to describe the place where an artifact is found. This includes matrix (material around artifact), provenience (vertical and horizontal location), and association (relationship to other features/artifacts).

Sieving: The act of passing soil recovered from the site through a fine mesh to recover any artifacts that were missed through digging. All material dug up on the site is sieved to ensure nothing gets overlooked! Any artifacts recovered are then
bagged according to artifact type and the specific context
they belong to.

Fun Facts:
[Image 8]: Sometimes shadows cast by the sun passing through leaves can make it difficult to see what’s
happening in the trench. To fix this, we hold up tarps to create a uniform shadow—especially helpful
when taking pictures of our trenches.
[Image 9]: When excavating around a rocky context or one with many tree roots, it is common to see sudden changes in the color of the soil in certain areas, making it look like it has inclusions. This, however, does not necessarily suggest a new context: processes like bioturbation (animal or plant root activity) may displace smaller rocks, causing the soil on top of it to fall due to gravity and fill its previous spot.

[Image 10]: At the start and end of every dig, each trench takes opening and closing photos. This helps us to visualize the progress made in the trench and keep an updated record of our trench’s status. In each opening and closing photo we include a scale bar and north pointing arrow that helps orient viewers when
looking at images of our trench. To take the photo, the photographer stands perpendicular to the scale bar.

Bring your family and friends to Community Archaeology Day on Saturday 10/26! Come by the List Art Building between 11:00am and 3:00pm to learn more about what we have been doing this semester. You’ll even get a chance to try some digging yourself!

Happy digging!

Archaeology of College Hill

11/18/2025

11/14/2025

11/07/2025

11/04/2025

10/28/2025

10/23/2025

10/07/2025

10/01/2025

12/02/2024

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10/21/2024

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