Contributed by Katie Lincoln
As Phillips Academy’s Lower School Institute (LSI) Dig This! course comes to the end of its seventh field season, students and instructors are so excited to share stories of the many artifacts they discovered at the school’s very own excavation site. At the start of the 2024 season, students were introduced to the story of the Mansion House, an eighteenth century home which belonged to the founder of the academy, and now lies buried underneath the lawn of the West Quad on Phillips Academy campus. The Mansion House stood on the property for 105 years before being burned down through an act of arson, which was never solved or prosecuted. The remains of the house laid just centimeters underneath the surface of the quad for a little over 100 years before LSI’s summer session course began the long process of meticulously digging it up.
After being introduced to the legacy of the Mansion House and its past excavations, the 2024 archaeology crew set out to build upon this research by investigating parts of the site which have never been previously tested. Specifically, six teams were each assigned a 1 X 1 meter unit and asked to investigate a given region of the West Quad, whether it be just outside of the Mansion House walls, in the area suspected to hold a nineteenth century privy, or the very place where a neighboring nineteenth century printing house was known to have stood. Equipped with shovels, trowels, and screens, the six teams got to work and all quickly began to gather archaeological data.
While no team this summer unearthed ash layers relating to the infamous 1887 fire, which resulted in the destruction of the Mansion House, several groups discovered an abundance of charcoal and burned brick. Additionally, the two groups assigned to dig in the hypothesized privy, EU 2404+2405, uncovered a plethora of cultural materials, including a button, many ceramic shards, and faunal bones. Specifically, a small black glass button, which was unearthed in EU2405, became of great interest to the students. Because black glass beads were only in fashion during the ten-year period when England’s Queen Victoria was in mourning, the button students found can be dated to that decade between 1861 to 1870. How exciting!
Students stationed in the area believed to be where the nineteenth century printing house once stood uncovered a considerable amount of leather. It is unknown if this leather came from shoes or book bindings, however the find itself is incredible given how well the material preserved over time!
Despite the fact that the 2024 Dig This! crew did not uncover any features relating to the Mansion House, privy, or printing house, students still reveled in the amount of cultural material found and were very excited to show it off at their LSI student exhibition. Students specifically enjoyed the opportunity to set up an archaeology simulation, where they explained the process of digging and let others take a stab at excavating exciting treasures in the form of candy!
Cheers to another amazing summer of learning in the dirt!
The Peabody 