Digging Veritas

eyeglass lens and lice comb excavated from harvard yard.

The Harvard Yard Archaeology Project

The Harvard Yard Archaeology Project is a collaborative, public archaeology project that is run as a year-long undergraduate course and takes place on the oldest part of the campus, an area once included the seventeenth-century Old College and Indian College buildings. Our current work focuses on exploring the lives of the English and Native students who attended Harvard in the seventeenth century, and how their lives were shaped by institutional goals of creating Puritan ministers for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A important facet of this story is the underrepresented story of Native education at Harvard, including the first printing press in the English colonies, which was located in the Indian College building, and the work of Nipmuc printer Wawaus to publish the Bible and other texts in Algonquian. Toward this end, the Project aims to educate students in local Indigenous history, historical public archaeology; and to explore educational history, colonial America and our collective future.