Beneath the Ivory Tower: The Archaeology of Academia

II. Diachronic Views of College Life: Separating the Real from the Ideal

II Diachronic Views of College Life Separating the Real from the Ideal We often see the past as a mirror of the present and transpose current function and meaning onto objects of the past. Educational institutions seem particularly prone to be viewed as changeless entities whose pasts are assumed to mirror the present or are so entwined with romantic myth as to bear little semblance to reality. The following six chapters challenge us to examine the pasts of universities as well as public schools, to see how well our perceptions fit with reality. Archaeologists investigate portions of campuses, observing the material record of buildings and the features and objects associated with them, in order to gain knowledge of not only what they looked like but how they reveal the nature of the way people lived and carried out their academic activities. As a diachronic discipline, archaeology is employed to explore change on campuses through the material remains of their components. This ability has allowed the authors to trace the changing roles of buildings and the development of technologies but also to use these particular results to examine phenomena far larger than the individual contexts in which they were observed. Colleges and schools underwent substantial transformations in the past two centuries, and our understanding of them is enhanced by the information revealed by the archaeological record. ...