In search of artifacts beneath the soil near Charlotte Creek and Pine Lake, 20 college students from near and far have come to Davenport to participate in the Pine Lake Archaeological Field School, which run May 27 to June 26 this year.
Hosted by SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College every two years, the field school primarily searches for Native American artifacts from 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, SUNY Oneonta Professor Renee Whitman said Friday, June 19. The field site in the floodplain of Charlotte Creek was likely used for “ephemeral campsites” seasonally, she said.
“We’re close to the creek here,” Keir Tremoglie, a Dickinson College student working on the site, said Friday.
Though researchers have not been able to identify a specific tribe which used the site, it was likely a mix of the region’s ancestral peoples: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga and Tuscarora.
The roughly one-month program offers students the opportunity to gain work experience in archaeology and anthropology. From there, they can either pursue a career in the field or realize they want to explore something else.
Whitman said either way, she is able to speak to the work ability of students. The program is the only joint class between SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College, she said.
This year’s staff for the site also includes associate professor Namita Sugandhi of Hartwick College and adjunct professor Petra Flately of SUNY Oneonta. Students from each of those institutions only make up six of this year’s participants. Others came from a variety of institutions from Indiana University to SUNY Potsdam.
Whitman called the site, which is owned by Hartwick College and which she was hired to work on in 2002, “a really nice and special place.”
The property also includes a lodge with dorm-style housing, a lab space and other buildings and sheds scattered around the property.
In the “beginning, they bring us lots of rocks,” Whitman said of the students, but eventually they learn to differentiate those different rocks from a piece of a tool or remnants of a fire.
Chad Pickett, a SUNY Geneseo student, laid down to lean over an excavation square in search of artifacts from one such fire. He was looking for pieces of a fire pit covered in rocks used at the time to decrease the intensity of the flame to slow cook food or dry out hides.
Yards away, Willow MaGinnis, from SUNY Oneonta, and Michal Bezalely, from Queens College, used screens to pick out artifacts from the dirt.
After students find the artifacts, the team stores them in labeled bags or containers. The lab is used to identify them and enter them into a database.
“At first they’re like, ‘ah, I found an artifact,'” Whitman said. Then they realize that means paperwork, she said with a laugh.
To learn more about the field school, visit SUNY Oneonta’s webpage at https://tinyurl.com/bdesekjf or Hartwick’s webpage at https://tinyurl.com/y34h8vyt.