Harvard students unearth 350 years of college life one artifact at a time

Behind Hollis Hall, where students walk past every day, the ground is telling stories that textbooks never quite captured. For 20 years, the Harvard Yard Archaeology Project has been digging into the soil—literally—to understand what life was actually like for students in the 17th century. This year marks the 10th excavation, and students are hunting for remnants of Harvard Hall, a building that burned to the ground in 1764 and took John Harvard's entire donated library with it.

The dig site sits near Holden Chapel, where students armed with trowels, dustpans, and sifting screens work methodically through layers of earth. When something emerges—a fragment of pottery, a tobacco pipe stem, animal bones, a piece of metal from a book cover—they pause. They wipe away the dirt. They hold it up to the light. They pass it to a classmate. It's quiet, deliberate work, and it's teaching them something that lectures can't quite convey: that history isn't abstract. It's in the ground beneath their feet.

Diana Loren, co-lecturer and deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Peabody Museum, points out what makes this particular excavation so resonant. "We think of college buildings now as either dormitory or administrative. This was a building that was everything," she says. Harvard Hall housed kitchens, student chambers, study rooms, a library, lecture halls, and scientific equipment all under one roof. For students digging on the site where they live, that context lands differently. They're not just learning about the past—they're learning about the infrastructure that shaped the institution they're part of.

The real work happens in the spring semester. Back in the lab, students analyze what they've found, placing each artifact into historical context before it gets formally accessioned into the Peabody Museum's collection. Patricia Capone, curator of North America collections at the museum, sees this as essential training. "It's important for students to have this experience to understand the potential for stewarding cultural resources in their community," she explains.

Patricia Capone, a curator at the Peabody Museum, talks with a student

The Harvard Hall fire itself is historically significant—it marks a moment when the college was shifting from a purely religious institution toward one that embraced scientific inquiry. The diversity of objects recovered from the site reflects that transition. Capone notes that archaeology has a particular gift: "Archaeology is a good tool for helping tell the untold stories that are buried in the trash, or the privies—places like that." The stories that don't make it into official records often end up in the ground.

With each dig season, the project adds another layer to Harvard's material history. What emerges is less a polished institutional narrative and more a lived, complicated, human one.