Video: Life at Colonial Harvard: The Archaeological Evidence

 

Harvard University's 1650 charter founded a multicultural educational setting when it committed the new institution "to the education of the English and Indian Youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness." The Harvard Yard Archaeology Project contributes to renewing that commitment by seeking deeper knowledge of seventeenth-century Harvard College and the Native American and English students. Join Diana Loren and Patricia Capone in a presentation of the project's findings to date, including printing type from the first printing press in the British colonies and the results of the fourth excavation in Harvard Yard, conducted in 2014.

 

Diana Loren, Director of Academic Partnerships and Museum Curator

Patricia Capone, Museum Curator, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology

Recorded 3/31/15

Related

Gallery exhibition Digging Veritas: The Archaeology and History of the Indian College and Student Life at Colonial Harvard
Online exhibition Digging Veritas: The Archaeology and History of the Indian College and Student Life at Colonial Harvard

Transcript of Lecture

Life at Colonial Harvard: The Archaeological Evidence

[00:00:05.12] Welcome, everyone, tonight. For those of you old enough to remember, and those of you with a penchant for history, you may remember that Robert Frost delivered a poem at JFK's inaugural. And the poem began, "The land was ours before we were the land's."

[00:00:26.79] And Harvard University, throughout the years-- for a long period of time-- has recognized that fact in its interest in our colonial past, and especially our relationships with Native Americans. And it's in that tradition that archaeology has been carried out over many years, many different field seasons, many different efforts, in excavations in Harvard Yard.

[00:00:52.35] The focus on the Indian College, however, is particularly recent. It evolved out of a conference held by the Peabody Museum with the Harvard University Native American program in 2005, as part of our 350th anniversary.

[00:01:12.29] And subsequently in 2007, the Peabody Museum began-- with the department of anthropology, HUNAP, and many other stakeholders, as you will find out from the talk tonight-- to start recent excavations in Harvard Yard, focused on the Indian college, but open to investigating as many aspects of the colonial period as it encountered, of course.

[00:01:41.78] And that project was initiated under the auspices and direction of my predecessor William Fash, who was director of museum at the time, for whom we are extremely grateful. And that project has been carried out as a class at Harvard University pretty much regularly every other year since 2007 under the direct direction-- direct direction?-- of our speakers tonight.

[00:02:10.40] So I'm very pleased to introduce Diana Loren and Trish Capone as our speakers. They've been instrumental in procuring and curating the archaeological finds from Harvard Yard, many of which are on display in our exhibit, as Jane mentioned.

[00:02:28.55] Diana Loren is both museum curator and director of our Academic Partnerships program here at the Peabody, and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in ceramics and glass at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and completed her PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

[00:02:49.46] Her research interests include North American archaeology, colonial period archaeology, and archaeological and museum ethics. She's known for a commitment to education, and since 2006 has received the Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center here at Harvard six times.

[00:03:11.15] She's the author of many books, most recently The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America, published in 2010. And in 2008, she published In Contact: Bodies and Spaces in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Eastern Woodlands.

[00:03:27.80] Patricia Capone is also a museum curator here at the Peabody and is director of our repatriation and research services department. Does an amazing job. She received her PhD in anthropology here at Harvard, after completing undergraduate work in geology at Tufts University's Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

[00:03:48.10] Her research interests also-- as you might guess-- include historical archaeology and indigenous cultures, with an emphasis on the southwest and northeastern United States, as well as museum ethics. She's an expert on the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, and coordinates working with Native Americans and other stakeholders, as well as the Harvard Yard Project.

[00:04:18.12] She's spoken of her work at conferences, like those at the Institute of Museum Ethics, showing how NAGPRA and other ordinances can help create relationships of trust that inspire collaborative projects in new ways and with new ties between us and other stakeholders.

[00:04:41.20] So together, Diana and Trish serve as co-instructors in this course that you're going to hear about-- the Archaeology of Harvard Yard-- intended to raise awareness of the intersection between Harvard history, Native American education, and our students, being directly hands-on experiencing Harvard Yard and our past. So it's a pleasure to work with them too, by the way. They're great people, as well as great scholars. Please join me in welcoming them tonight.

[00:05:09.35] [APPLAUSE]

[00:05:19.07] Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jane, for the kind words. Trish and I are going to do a bit of a tag-team tonight. So I'm going to speak for a little bit, and then Trish is going to come up and speak. And thank you for coming tonight to hear about our work at Harvard Yard and our work with various partners. I thought I'd give a little bit of background on the beginnings of the project and where we started.

[00:05:40.21] So as Jeff mentioned, in 2005 the Harvard University Native American Program was commemorating the Indian College-- the 350th anniversary. In that same year, the Peabody got a call from Massachusetts Hall that said, "We're putting in a new HVAC system, and we heard that we should do some mitigation next to Mass Hall to make sure we don't obliterate any cultural deposits." So we combine the two efforts. We realized that we had an opportunity to dig in the Yard and start looking at the history of the Indian College.

[00:06:13.33] Now, the story of the Indian College isn't well known. It's not on any maps from the 17th century. Most of the images, such as this Paul Revere etching that you see here, are derived from the 18th century. There are some traces of the 17th century story of the Indian College in early Harvard archives, but really, little is known about Native American students in the 17th century.

[00:06:39.54] And you can see here-- this is a map that we use often. You'll see it in the exhibition-- this is a 1936 conjectural reconstruction of what the Yard looked like in the 17th century. And-- I usually walk out and just point, but I'll use the fancy technology-- here is the conjectural location of this 1655 Indian College building, and that's the sight of our excavations.

[00:07:05.55] But really, this information-- this map and other maps-- are all just conjectural. They're based on archival descriptions-- the location, the size of the buildings, the students who went there. And so a real material understanding of that past and a material understanding of colonial history is something that didn't exist until recently.

[00:07:25.37] So in 2005, we partnered with the Harvard University Native American Program and the anthropology department to learn more about the Indian College and 17th-century Harvard through archaeology. And it was in that time-- I know. Really, really excited students-- in 2005, we began to offer "The Archaeology of Harvard Yard" as a two-semester class.

[00:07:49.10] And I should say that the project is a collaborative project. We partner with the Peabody Museum, the Department of Anthropology, and the Harvard University American Program, as well as other scholars and professionals, stakeholders across campus, community members, and students to consider the varied perspectives of Harvard's past, present, and future. Now, currently Trish and I are co-instructors in the class. Adam Stack-- waving his hand-- is the TF. But past co-instructors, as Jeff mentioned, have included Bill Fash, as well as Christina Hodge.

[00:08:24.03] And I should note that we're not the first people to excavate in the Yard. There was previous work done in the 1980s at the location of the old college building and at Wadsworth House. But our excavations are focusing on the 1655 Indian College building. And we started at that location based on information we derived from the archival record, past excavations, as well as a ground penetrating radar survey that was conducted in 2006.

[00:08:55.90] So this past fall, we completed our fifth season out there in the Yard. And so we had students working-- excavating, working very hard-- and now this spring, students are working in the lab, cataloging the finds and working on some public projects of the product.

[00:09:13.73] You know, over all-- and Trish is going to talk about this as well-- we've sought to consider Harvard as a changing multicultural space. We think about the relationship between archaeology and the historical record, and the nature of public archaeology. We're out there in the Yard. You can't miss us. We talk to the students. Maybe you did miss us-- hopefully you didn't.

[00:09:34.23] And we're also situated in a university museum. And here's where we have the greatest opportunity. We have an opportunity to work with students in the field and in the museum to guide them through the process of accessioning artifacts into the museum's collection. And I would say that this unique opportunity to excavate and to go through the process of accessioning is only possible here at Harvard. So it's a great opportunity for us.

[00:10:01.71] As I mentioned, we're a public archaeology project. We partner stakeholders and community members to elicit feedback and fine-tune our research methodologies. We excavate in a very public area, and staff and students speak to the public about the project, and the history of the Indian College, this little known history.

[00:10:19.98] So all of that media includes news coverage, regular exhibition tours and public talks, Archaeology Week events, opening ceremonies, open houses, spring meetings, and this season, Instagram. We're very excited about this. And hopefully it'll come up and it didn't.

[00:10:40.14] So here's our #highup2014 Instagram, where we had students contribute shots and images from the excavations. And I just want to show one-- I just put one up, which didn't show up yet. But I just want to show one that Adam took-- a hyper-lapse of the field. It's pretty great. And it'll just keep repeating. Magic. All right.

[00:11:29.02] Seamless.

[00:11:29.64] Seamless. Exactly. We'll be visiting Digging Veritas later. This is one of the products of the student work, and our work is the exhibition that's on exhibit at Peabody Museum. And I should mention that this season, the students are working on cataloging collections, but they're also working on updates to our online exhibits. So yet to come-- stay tuned. And I'm going to pass the baton to Trish.

[00:12:03.04] [APPLAUSE]

[00:12:04.53] I'm coming back. Thank you.

[00:12:06.31] We're going back and forth. Thank you. And thank you for coming and bearing with our technology. I'm going to talk about the context-- some of the historical context, as well as present-day memory-making context of the research, and the project as it unfolds in public archaeology.

[00:12:30.03] I also want to point out, as Diana raised, that the course and the project relate to frameworks of anthropological thinking. Peabody Museum is a museum of archaeology and ethnology, so we're always returning to our frameworks of anthropological thinking as we work. Frameworks like relativism, contemporary theories of thinking about memory, and ideas of heritage, creation of physical surroundings, theories of practice, and how multicultural frameworks and behaviors-- appropriate or inappropriate-- come into play to shape the space around us.

[00:13:09.24] And this is particularly exciting when thinking about Harvard Yard, because it's a space that we know, but in historical context, it can be both the same and very different. And so I'll try and bring up some of the specific examples in which that unfolds.

[00:13:27.81] The archaeology of this situation brings forth the contributions of the material record and brings them into dialogue with the historical record, which had received most of the attention until around the '70s, when more excavations of the Yard began to take place, and then until the more recent past, when we began reconsidering Harvard's indigenous relationships and the importance of the site for indigenous stakeholders.

[00:14:03.38] So thinking about the history of Harvard-- some facts and figures. Established in 1636, the college opened in 1638 with one master, nine students, all of whom lived in a house facing Braintree Street, now Mass Ave. You might have noticed the brass plaques when you cross Mass Ave. In 1639, the old college-- the first building-- was built, and that was a three story wooden structure and also the focus of John Stubbs' excavations in the 1980s.

[00:14:36.84] So Harvard was soon struggling financially not too long after founding. The English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England raised and granted funds for Indian education at Harvard, which is thought to some extent to have saved the financially ailing institution. The charter of 1650 manifests this promise and dedicates the institution-- and I quote-- "to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness."

[00:15:12.44] OK. So as both Jeff and Diana mentioned, the current excavations have been focusing on the Indian College, the site of the Indian College. This is a conjectural reconstruction of the Indian College, as well as the names of the students who are known to have attended the College. Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, Joel Iacoombs, John Wampus, and Eleazar .

[00:15:40.69] And they're known particularly from documentation, various pieces in Harvard University archives, other archives. And it's really fascinating how with keen eyes on the lookout, new documents are discovered from time to time that relate to them and really fill out the story.

[00:16:07.79] So John Eliot and the printing press. I wanted just to take a moment to set the story in the context of broader Puritan history. Around this time, the British government-- and to some extent in Holland-- were cracking down on Puritan proselytizing, and that included the printing of their religious materials. The New England colony, and Harvard as a possible setting, was being viewed as a potential location for taking up some of this potential printing of Puritan documents.

[00:16:44.69] So within the context, literacy was integral to the Protestant religious expression, and a key component of the proselytizing effort. To forward the mission, John Eliot-- well known pastor, 17th-century-- was working with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and Harvard to establish the first printing press in the British colonies, and one of the foci that was to produce materials that would relate to the Indian College effort.

[00:17:17.85] Approximately 15 books were printed in Algonquin, and many more in English and other languages. And the well-known Indian Bibles also were a result of this effort.

[00:17:33.70] What happened to the Indian College? Some have described it as an educational experiment. It ended after a brief period in 1670, when the building was then devoted to printing. A number of factors have been cited accounting for the decline of the Indian College. In part, Metacom's Rebellion, also known as King Philip's War, 1675-1676, and the troubled relationships that that was an outcome of.

[00:18:09.52] In 1698, the Indian College's empty and crumbling building was dismantled. The bricks were re-used to build Old Stoughton Hall. Soon after, the Indian College becomes a footnote in Harvard history.

[00:18:25.98] But with the Harvard University Native American Program and other neighboring indigenous interests, including language revitalization projects, such as the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project, taking up a closer look at the Bible, and some of the other documentation that surrounds the Indian College, in the '90s, this plaque was installed on Matthew's Hall, nearby the site of the Indian College.

[00:18:59.52] As Diana mentioned, there are no maps indicating where the site was, but this began to put the Indian College back on our landscape consciousness. In addition, we already mentioned the Harvard University Native American Program commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the Indian College, and that was with a conference titled "From the Gospel to Sovereignty," and these are some visitors and participants in the conference.

[00:19:34.46] So following the conference, we got to thinking and talking more about re-imagining Harvard's context using contemporary anthropological and other thought frameworks to rethink what some of the historical details and archaeological evidence means. And then the most recent commemoration of the Indian College is a student initiative-- this Wetu project. Maybe some of you saw it. A Wetu-- indigenous Wampanoag dwelling-- was erected in Harvard Yard, right near the site of the Indian College in 2011.

[00:20:16.42] OK. Back to Diana.

[00:20:23.87] So we're just going to show some of the recent excavations in the Yard pertaining to the 17th-century history. So as we talked about, we started in 2005 next to-- there we go-- Massachusetts Hall and behind Matthews. In 2007, we moved in front of Matthews to the center of the Yard here, and that's been the focus of our excavation, this area here in front of Matthews.

[00:20:52.38] This is the site map. So this is showing us the 17th-century plan view of what we've excavated in front of Matthew's. Keep in mind that we're digging through 21st, 20th, 19th, and 18th-century history to get down to the 17th century and understand the Indian College and the life of students.

[00:21:13.19] So what you're seeing here-- this pink is the foundation trench for the Indian College building. It runs north-south. Here is the interior of the structure.

[00:21:29.14] What you're seeing here, what we excavated this year with a clay foundation-- underpinnings. Described in the archives as clay underpinnings of the building. And then here, the continuation of the trench. So the trench continued through the last few years of excavation, and it looks like the south here was bisected by an 18th- and 19th-century drain that went right over the excavation-- went right over the foundation trench for the Indian College.

[00:22:04.75] So we've excavated what is the east wall of the building. Again, a raw daub foundation trench. When Trish was talking about the history, she mentioned that the Indian College was dismantled and then the bricks and foundation material was reused to build Old Stoughton, which no longer stands. So what we find is a trench that has some broken architectural material related to 17th-century construction, but much of it is gone.

[00:22:39.18] And then with the clay underpinnings, what we're recovered this year is this interesting way to reinforce a building on what's really marshy land in the 17th century. We know from the historical documents that the old college building, which stood next to the Indian College, had really fallen in on itself by the mid-17th century. And so extra efforts were put into the construction of the Indian College building, so that would be a brick structure that stood without falling in on itself.

[00:23:11.69] So what we know from the archival record is that they bring in the clay, that was then used to pave the base, and then the structure is built on that clay. If you have any further questions on this, you can ask us. I know it's a detailed map.

[00:23:31.63] So a little information on some the material that we're finding. Lots and lots of artifacts related to drinking. So wine bottles, not surprisingly-- student life in the 17th century. How different is it?

[00:23:46.94] [LAUGHTER]

[00:23:47.70] So you should know that 1655 college laws stated that-- and I'll quote here-- "Neither shall he, without sufficient reasons, such as the president or his tutor, shall prove either take tobacco or permit to be brought into his chambers strong beer, wine, and strong water, or any inebriating drink, to the end that all excess and abuse therefore may be prevented." No drinking. Drinking.

[00:24:18.10] No smoking. We find-- one of the most prevalent items in our excavations are tobacco pipes, both white clay and red clay. So locally produced and English imported.

[00:24:33.63] Lots of material related to clothing. So again, 1655 laws state that no one shall go out of their chamber unless they're wearing a cloak, and that no one, nowhere, should have any excess of apparel. The archaeological record-- the material related to clothing and adornment suggests a little bit fancier dress than they were allowed. This season we came across this great pair of silver alloy cufflinks, as well as-- this is a shoe buckle, a wig curler-- for your powdered wig. Seals for bales of cloth that were being imported into the colony, buttons, and even a silver earring.

[00:25:24.52] It's a historic site. We have tons of ceramics and bottle material related to the diet and tableware of the students. What we see is a really varied assemblage of ceramics and a wide-ranging diet. So suggesting some importance of status at the table, but maybe a less than stellar diet for the students.

[00:25:48.71] We also have some interesting material related to health and wellness. So the students are compounding their own medicines from different recipes to make themselves feel better. And what we find are some pharmaceutical bottle fragments, as well as some floral remains.

[00:26:07.66] And this one is black henbane, which was found in some of the excavations. Black henbane isn't a North American plant. Rather, it's brought from England and cultivated here. It's not used in food, but rather used for the treatment of inflammation and burns. So some evidence suggesting that students are ministering themselves.

[00:26:32.55] And then, finally I'm going to turn it over to Trish one last time, the little object that speaks loudly is the printing type. So back to Trish.

[00:26:52.10] OK. So one of the artifact types that we've chosen to focus extended attention on-- and I'm going to share some new findings information with you tonight regarding-- the printing type. As I mentioned previously, the first printing press in the British colonies was at the Indian College and in Cambridge.

[00:27:14.35] And one of the headliner artifacts that has resulted from the excavations-- and previous excavations-- in Harvard Yard are pieces of printing type, which we've been eager to better understand and potentially link to the various books and instruments of literacy that were coming out of the Indian College. This upper shot here is students discovering printing type deep in Harvard Yard, and realizing firsthand what their finds might be able to contribute to.

[00:27:58.04] Work in the '80s and late '70s also yielded a number of pieces of printing type, including this L here, which was linked to the Indian grammar of 1666. Gray Graffam was responsible for those excavations.

[00:28:17.45] And here's a shot of what some of these pieces of type actually look like. There have been a total of approximately 28 pieces of type, and we think roughly 22 of them may be attributable to the 17th century, the earliest episodes of printing in Harvard Yard.

[00:28:39.50] OK. So some of these analyses involved partnerships. And as was previously mentioned, the topic of the archaeology of Harvard Yard and colonial Harvard in the Indian College is of shared interest among different facets, both inside and outside the university.

[00:29:02.96] For this particular project, we partnered with Houghton libraries-- Hope Mayo is here tonight-- to conduct some specialized analyses of the printing type, and with the Peabody Museum conservation department, particularly Judy Jungels and T Rose Holdcraft were involved in these analyses as well, and interns Lindsay Ward and Sean Goings did some of the major hands-on work, for which we're grateful.

[00:29:34.65] So their analyses involved several different elements, including a dimensional analysis, things like a body size-- how could it lead to type font grouping was the focus of that analysis. Things like height to paper-- types with the same height to paper could have been printed on the same page. And spacers. There were quite a few spacers-- or basically blanks-- and they are not necessarily as informative for our purposes relating them to the books, but they do form a significant portion of the artifact body.

[00:30:16.52] So conservation was a major first step in these analyses. There was some treatment prior to casting of the printing types. It was decided that the lead type needed further cleaning before it could be replicated In order to provide a better impression for casting. So in order to compare the types to the resulting books that had been printed in the 17th century, it was necessary to mold the types, and make casts, and then print with them.

[00:30:53.85] The analysis results from some chemical analyses helped to determine the most suitable conservation treatment. And it was decided that the most suitable treatment would be a careful mechanical treatment under the microscope with soft brushes and tiny wooden tools, as you can see here. After cleaning, the print type was coated prior to molding and casting to protect the metal during the mold-making process, and all the treatments involved were reversible.

[00:31:24.62] So Judy Jungels worked with the students to conduct x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. For this study, the elemental composition of the Harvard Yard historic print type was determined with XRF. 22 samples of type were analyzed, and each sample of type was analyzed in three spots to produce an average compositional result. This was necessary, because in the casting process, metals can segregate, producing an uneven composition.

[00:31:54.27] All the type analyzed had large peaks for lead, and traced to small peaks for tin and antimony. Iron and calcium were also present in some of the samples. The iron may be a result from impurities from the processing. So the dimensional analysis, the x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, all of these analyses are toward better documenting the types, and also making them accessible for others who are studying the history of early printing.

[00:32:28.33] Here's a look at what the molding, casting, and printing process looked like, and we also want to acknowledge Peter Burns and Richard Meadows zoo-archaeology lab for their assistance with casting and molding. So after literally taking the casts and touching them to an ink pad with Hope Mayo's able eye and hand, they set to attempting to match some of the types to books.

[00:33:09.13] I think we're really through sort of the first phase of this, which involves assigning font types and sizes with the really painstaking work of attempting to fingerprint the type and match them to specific printed products. Whether or not that will be possible to a great degree, we'll see, but with everyone's working together, I think we have a really good data set now in terms of having documented their sizes and styles and being able to then compare them to the sizes and styles of the books that have been printed.

[00:33:53.15] And this is one example of that-- the long primer s is similar in font and size to that used in the Bay Psalm Book, 1640-- you may have heard of that volume. Additionally in the 1980s, there was an o, also known as the broken o, which had been matched to the Genesis section of the second edition of the Indian Bible.

[00:34:33.07] And with that, we have many people to thank, as we've mentioned. There are lots of partnerships involved in the class, the project, and every element of the ongoing study. Should we thank them together? Do you want to come up here, or should I do this?

[00:34:52.54] So the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Department of Anthropology, the Harvard University Native American Program, all of the students, teaching fellows, and co-instructors of the project, Houghton Library at Harvard University, Harvard University Archives, Harvard Yard Operations, and Harvard Landscape Maintenance.

[00:35:16.12] [LAUGHTER]

[00:35:19.24] So we brought some artifacts from the excavations for you to look at. We'll pull those out, and happy to take any questions on the project and the work we've done.

[00:35:28.06] [APPLAUSE]