From Camps to the Contemporary Campus

This morning, I finally got back to working on my long simmering book project, and I picked up where I left off well over a month ago. My current chapter is on military camps and college campuses. I had a completed draft of the first part of chapter done toward the end of July, and now I’m turning my attention to a brief survey of archaeological work on contemporary life on college campuses. 

Ideally, I’ll conclude this chapter with a brief summary of my work on the Wesley College Documentation Project.  

Here’s what I wrote today.

Christopher Tilley and Kate Cameron-Daum in their study of the activity of the Royal Marines in the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands noted that the unique landscape fo the pebblebed heathlands served the rigorous training undertaken by the Royal Marine Commandos in this landscape (2017). This landscape plays a key role in shaping the body of the soldiers as they endure grueling weeks of training activities set against human and natural features in this distinctive environment. From copses of trees and hills to paths, foxholes, and water features cut into the hard pebbly ground of the heath, the experience of training in this unforgiving terrain contributed to the sense of camaraderie among Royal Marines as well as their tactical abilities (Tilley and Cameron-Daum 2017, 84-123). Like the Nevada Test Site and the Woomera rocket range in South Australia, sites such as the East Devon heathlands formed part of the sprawling battlefield of the Cold War and in same cases to the 21st-century “War on Terror.”

The Cold War, however, did not play out only in military training and testing sites. American college and university campuses likewise contributed to the shaping of generations of citizens who contributed to the larger scientific, political, and cultural project that reinforced and critiqued the Cold War rivalry between totalizing views of democracy and capitalism and those of communism. As Laurie Wilkie’s brilliant study of the fraternity Zeta Psi on the University of California’s Berkeley campus has shown, fraternity life played a key role in shaping the white, male, upper class identities of the fraternity’s brotherhood. Through a careful and creative reading of material culture, architecture, and documentary sources, Wilkie traced the role that Zeta Psi fraternity played in shaping the identity of its brotherhood and reflecting and amplifying the larger social situation of American university life and culture in the late-19th and early-20th century. Her excavations of the two generations of Zeta Psi fraternity houses that had become the property of the University of California in the 1950s demonstrated the potential for archaeological work to reveal a nuanced and deeply human image of fraternity life that navigates a complex middle ground between the dystopian visions of fraternity life present in the mass media and the utopia aspirations of their founders (Wilkie 2010, 7-8).

Wilkie conducted an archaeological field school at the Zeta Psi fraternity house where she worked with students to document and excavate the site. This approach represents a significant trend in the discipline (Skowronek and Lewis 2010). On campus field schools not only offer more inclusive opportunities for students (Dutton et al. 2019) but also provide good opportunities for outreach to the campus community whose support is often vital to the sustainability of programs (Klein et al. 2018). The results of such field work invariably complicate the relationship between often-pious official histories of the campus community and evidence for the lived experience of student (and faculty life). Dutton’s discovery of bullet casings dating to the end of the 19th and early 20th century in excavations on Brown University’s campus suggest that students did not take contemporary on campus gun bans serious at that time (Dutton 2019, 307). Similarly, work at the former Zeta Psi house produced a significant number of alcohol bottles from the era of probation indicating that the residents of that house continued to consume alcohol despite the legal ban (Wilkie 2010, 195-199). These kinds of the disjunctures between official policies and rules and practices are ubiquitous in historical archaeology. In general, attention to the archaeology of the contemporary university and college campus’s has focused on the past. This is consistent with the often conservative attitudes toward campus life and the physical fabric common at American universities. The emphasis on tradition as a way to create memories shared across generations of students creates an environment where archaeology would complement the larger mission of the university in preserving and presenting its own past and image of persistence.

Several attempts, however, have been made to focus more narrowly on the archaeology of contemporary campus life. In the early 1980s, Wilk and Schiffer, for example, proposed a class that used the material culture of the University of Arizona as the basis for studying and documenting archaeological formation process, stratigraphy, survey, and hypothesis building as well as a more acute understanding of modern material culture (Wilk and Schiffer 1981). They started by introducing students to evidence for wear patterns, architectural stratigraphy, and discard patterns across campus on a material culture tour. Students were encouraged to develop hypotheses for these patterns and eventually document them on their own. More recently, Stacey Lynn Camp’s “Campus Trash Project” at the University of Idaho integrated some of the lesson of William Rathje’s garbology project with contemporary environmental and conservation concerns on the university campus (Camp 2010). Like most campus archaeology projects, part of the goal of Camp’s work was to train students in methods of intensive archaeological documentation. By documenting the distribution of trash across campus, the discard practices associated with regular events like tailgating, and the impact of trash on ecologically sensitive landscapes, Camp’s project sought also to inform policy decisions and propose better ways to manage discard on campus. In a similar project G. Logan Miller developed an archaeological methods class designed to documented the distribution of cigarette butts on the Illinois State campus (Miller 2017). The decision to document cigarette butts, in a time when many campuses are going smoke free and many see smoking to be in decline, served to demonstrate that archaeology can challenge the “hegemonic narrative“ found in the documentary records. Miller and his students were able to show the cigarette butts were most often recovered in high-traffic areas, but also that most cigarette butts were over a month old and likely moved from their original location of discard. This attentiveness to site formation, time, and distribution created a context that would allow for more refined analysis of his dataset. Their simple conclusion that smoking continues to occur at measurable levels on and around campus contributes to the larger trend in campus archaeology that seeks to complicate traditional narratives of campus life.