A Well-Grounded Education

Dirt Detectives school program gets kids to dig history

by CAROLIN COLLINS Education Program Manager

Historic New England’s school programs are designed to be hands-on, interactive, and immersive, as well as grounded in history and tied to the curriculum. Dirt Detectives at Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm in Newbury, Massachusetts, one of our longest running programs, is a perfect example of these principles in action.

Students learn about archaeology through doing archaeology. The program moves them through four stations, each dedicated to one aspect of archaeological work. Students dig for artifacts, crossmend pottery shards, use contextual clues to identify unfamiliar objects, and make inferences about the lifestyles of people at the farm from the types of things they owned, ate, and disposed. Throughout the twoand-a-half-hour field trip students are asked to consider topics related to geography, ecology, and environmental conditions and how these factored into life on the farm.

Dirt Detectives was created following a 1989 archaeological dig at Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm led by the late Boston University archaeologist Mary Beaudry. After the dig was over, she left us a test pit, which is the centerpiece of Dirt Detectives. We seed the pit with artifacts from our teaching collection. Just as in a real dig, the pit is divided into quadrants. Students work in teams of three, one team per quadrant; each team has an excavator, a recorder, and a collector. The excavator uses a trowel to gently scrape layers of dirt away until they reveal an object. The recorder notes the location of the object on a recording sheet; the position of the object gives researchers clues about the time period in which it was used and its relationship to other objects. Finally, the collector removes the object. The students then switch jobs so that everyone has a chance doing each task.

Digging is what people tend to think of first when they think about archaeology, but much of the work happens in the lab. For example, at the cross-mending station, students are faced with tables full of broken pottery pieces. They must match the pieces and use painter’s tape to temporarily put them back together as best they can; this activity helps them to better identify the number and type of objects represented.

When the pandemic shutdown began in March 2020, all in-person school programs were canceled. Although we recognize that nothing can truly replace the experience of students’ getting their hands dirty by scraping in the pit, Historic New England wanted to offer an online version of Dirt Detectives. We created two twenty-minute filmed segments that take students through the dig, cross-mending, and exploring the house, along with a packet of review questions and primary source materials that we now offer with a live forty-fiveminute online class. We will continue to make this version of the program available for schools that can’t visit the farm because of distance or cost.

This past spring we welcomed our first school groups back to the farm. It was wonderful to reconnect in person with students. Even though we were all wearing masks, their excitement was evident as they uncovered bits of history for themselves.

Fourth-graders from the Glen Urquhart School in Beverly, Massachusetts, working in the archaeology pit (left) and at the cross-mending station in the Dirt Detectives program at Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm in Newbury, Massachusetts.