The Archaeology of College Hill

It’s a Monday afternoon in late September, and it’s the first day of excavations for an undergraduate course at Brown University called Archaeology of College Hill. A group of students carefully scrape away dirt from two pits on the Quiet Green looking for remnants of the house of the first president of Brown University, James Manning.

It’s tedious work. Using trowels, students meticulously scrape away layers of dirt and deposit it in white five gallon buckets. The dirt is then dumped into a sifter, a wood contraption with a screen at the top. A student gently shakes the sifter allowing the finer particles of dirt and debris to pass through the screen and onto the ground, while catching larger debris and potential objects of interest.

The students scrape and sift, all under the watchful eye of their professor, Linda Gosner, a graduate student from Arizona, and their teaching assistant, Andrew Dufton, an energetic fellow wearing a shirt with the words “I’d rather be cockfighting” plastered on the front. He instructs students on digging techniques: “Small roots can come out by cutting them at the ends.”

Gosner, who spent the summer excavating a coptic hermitage in Egypt, says that the goal of the class is to precisely locate Manning’s house. “There’s a plaque on the fence at the Quiet Green that says the president’s house is located ‘near this location.’ We want to change that.” It is hoped that excavations will solve the mystery, a fitting task for Brown’s 250th Anniversary celebrations, which start in January.

The process of scraping and sifting goes on for 15 minutes or so. The 12 students crack jokes to break the monotony: “What’s our policy on worms?” But soon enough the monotony is broken. First, a bottle cap appears in the sifter. Then a coin appears in one of the pits. Next to the coin students place a photographic scale and a trowel with the tip facing north and snap a photo. A few more coins turn up. A square button is found in the sifter. A piece of ceramic is found, an artifact Dufton refers to as potential ‘material culture.’ A key turns up. They find a pen marked Hotel Concorde St. Lazare. Each is dutifully bagged and marked with the date, pit number and the context, a distinct layer of soil with similar characteristics. Most of the finds are coming from the trench referred to as Quiet Green 3, which is thought to be the one overlying the first president’s house. The other trench, referred to as Quiet Green 4, is thought to overlay a path leading to the house.

The class known as the Archaeology of College Hill was dreamed up by graduate students about seven years ago. Since then, teams of undergraduate archaeology students have excavated at various locations of historical importance on College Hill. Artifacts are catalogued and displayed in Rhode Island Hall, the home of the archaeology department. Classes generally blog about their exploits, posting daily excavation reports, photos of findings and final reports. In 2007, students dug at the First Baptist Church. The September 24, 2007 entry indicates that students “continue to puzzle over three square features” found in one pit.

The November 12, 2007 entry describes the first day in the lab, which included washing and drying the artifacts, preparing them for weighing, measuring and analysis. Students then prepare an extensively detailed object biography, which includes the origins of each artifact and its potential relationship to the project site.
In 2008 and 2009, students dug at the John Brown House. One student wrote a fascinatingly detailed study on a plastic coffee lid from McDonalds. The lid was eventually included in the final exhibition at the John Brown House in a panel entitled “Coffee Culture,” which is accompanied by a brief description: “Rhode Islanders love their coffee! All of these Coffee arti- facts were excavated from the John Brown House lawn.”

Excavations moved to campus in 2012. Students performed excavations at the Hope College Dormitory. This year, they moved to what once was the heart of the original campus: the Quiet Green, so called because it’s mainly quiet these days, since the bulk of the action now happens on the Main Green. The first building was University Hall. Built in 1770, it was sited to look out over the city of Providence to the west. The campus was composed primarily of University Hall, Rhode Island Hall, Hope College and Manning Hall, and the Quiet Green was essentially the school’s front lawn. But all of this changed. Raymond Rhinehart, in a wonderful piece on Brown’s architectural history in the September/October 2013 issue of Brown Alumni Magazine, writes:

As Providence expanded up what was now called College Hill, and as the city became a great industrial center, Brown gradually turned in on itself as a place apart. Walls and gates went up; the center of the cam- pus was no longer the lawn in front of University Hall but the emerging College Green on the other side.

It was on the Quiet Green where the house of the school’s first president, James Manning, sat. A contemporary depiction of the house indicates an almost pastoral scene: the house, made of clapboard, rests among what appears to be small plots of crops, and in the background rises University Hall, a smooth, sloping green lawn between it and the house. A plaque on the fence at the western terminus of the Quiet Green marks the general location of the house, which stood until 1840, when it was demolished.

This year’s Archaeology of College Hill class began with a ground penetrating radar survey of the Quiet Green, the results indicating a sub-surface rectilinear anomaly in an area northwest of University Hall, the general location where Manning’s house stood. The results of this survey were used to locate two 6’ by 6’ excavation pits, one thought to intersect with the house’s foundation, the other with a footpath linking the house and Pros- pect Street. A fence was built around the excavation area. Digging, which began on September 23, occurs every Monday from 3 to 5:20pm.

The class created a Facebook page and a blog to provide updates on findings and progress. The class hosted a special day of excavation on Parents Weekend, which was well attended. On that day, much of the ‘usual’ was found: chunks of brick, rusted nails, glass, and ceramic. But they also found something a little unusual: pieces of animal bones and bits of a smoking pipe.

Excavations were completed November 4. Students then moved indoors for lab analyses of objects. Students will put on an exhibition of the findings at the end of the semester. After this, the artifacts will be displayed with all of the other artifacts found by previous Archaeology of College Hill classes, in the basement of Rhode Island Hall.

There are some interesting finds. In Quiet Green 4, the students found what appears to be a potential indication of an old, long forgotten pathway, perhaps the one leading from the house to the street. Most notably perhaps was the discovery of a large skeleton key, in Quiet Green 3, a find documented on the class’s Facebook page: “Top find so far this afternoon - a giant key!” Unfortunately, however, indications of a house foundation were not found, so it would appear that the mystery of the exact location of James Manning’s house lives on. It’s a bittersweet result: the mystery remains, as does the reason for future digs.