Beneath the Ivory Tower: The Archaeology of Academia

I. The Process of Identifying the “Educational World” in the Archaeological Record

I The Process of Identifying the “Educational World” in the Archaeological Record When archaeology is mentioned in connection with historical research, we often think of its role as discovering ruins, objects, and other tangible remains that are linked to events of the past. A traditional task of archaeology has always been to find material evidence of previous human behavior. Its results allow us to identify such events in space but also to understand them in the context of larger processes and explore them on different scales of inquiry. Archaeology involves much more than simply identifying and describing old things, and the authors of the initial chapters in this book address questions that reach far beyond these limited goals. Their investigations at four university campuses examined the nature of the archaeological record and how it was formed as well as how its nature and composition reflect the activities that produced it and the broader milieu in which they were carried out. All of the historical contexts studied were dynamic in the sense that they represented institutional responses to wider changes in American society. College campuses and their inhabitants adapted to the evolving role of higher education and to the uncertainties that accompanied its development, yet these changes are only poorly documented in the written record. Unconscious and deliberate omission of information has left a less than complete account of the history of academic institutions. These chapters demonstrate that much of this untold story lies buried with the material record it generated. Their results argue that archaeology has value as a tool for conducting basic historical research on campus and must have a continuing role in examining our academic past. ...