Introduction

In order to spread awareness and educate the Carleton Community about Pine Hill Village and the work we did all term, one group of students engaged in a program of community outreach. We held a community archaeology field day to show faculty, staff, students, and locals our excavation site. We also designed signs demonstrating some of our class’s findings. These will be displayed on the Pine Hill Village site throughout the summer. Finally, we made plans to display artifacts in the Carleton Gould Library over the course of Fall 2017. This type of outreach allows us to connect the work we have done in class with our larger community and to bring a piece of Carleton’s history back into the local consciousness. Not only was our small class able to learn from Pine Hill Village but, through community engagement, we were able to share that knowledge with many others and ensure that Pine Hill Village will continue to be known and talked about for some time to come.

As a group, we agreed that the most incredible aspect of the project was the process of finding an entire settlement under our noses, largely lost in the collective memory of the Carleton community. A huge part of Carleton history, where entire families grew up, was laying under the grass of the lacrosse field students use every day. We realized that this local history deserved to be shared, and shared in the way that was so impactful for us: through the archaeological process. We designed several projects intended to show Pine Hill Village’s history along with the process by which is was discovered.

Community Archaeology Field Day

For our first project, on May 23, 2017, our class hosted a Community Archaeology Field Day to inform people about the recent fieldwork that the class has been doing. The Carleton and Northfield community were all invited to hear more about the history of the village, to see uncovered artifacts, and to explore the archaeological site of Pine Hill Village. Our group planned, organized and promoted the event. 

We posted signs about the event and sent emails to professors who passed them on to their students. We also contacted Northfield News, which published two articles about the event. Those can be found here, and here.

With between 10 and 15 visitors, we were able to share our survey method, shovel test pits, excavations, and artifact analysis in real time, immersing visitors in the history in by literally bringing them into the processes that uncovered it. Of note, the director of Academic Civic Engagement, Adrienne Falcon, and the Dean of the College, Beverly Nagel, attended the event.

Informational Panels in the Arboretum:

For our second project, we created and installed three signs at the site of Pine Hill Village. In these signs, we oriented visitors to the layout and history of the site, while also explaining some of the archaeological process the class followed over the course of our fieldwork. We thought it was important to install signs at Pine Hill Village to continue sharing the village’s history after the end of our course, and we collaborated with the Director of the Arboretum Nancy Breaker to make this possible. These signs are currently placed at high traffic areas around the village, and will be there over the summer of 2017. To see the detailed location of these signs, you can visit the map we’ve created on ArcGIS. The signs will help us to reach a broader audience, especially those visiting for Reunion, and continue to share the memory of Pine Hill Village. Pictured above, our signs focus on a general history of the village, our excavation work, and highlight one of the many oral histories our class conducted. More quotes and oral histories can be found here.

Below you can see the installed signs! We hope you can visit them and the site of Pine Hill Village, or that you found our website after seeing the signs.

Conclusion/Takeaway

We were excited to engage with the larger Carleton community and to inform them of something so intrinsic to Carleton’s history. Speaking to a combination of students, faculty members, and professors allowed us to reach the entirety of campus and connect them all in different ways with their school’s past. Our goal was to make the history of Pine Hill Village accessible to anyone interested, which we were able to do through our Archaeology Field Day and signage near the site. Archaeology Field Day allowed us to work directly with the community, speaking to individuals and transferring our enthusiasm through conversations and stories of our own experiences. We also started research on hopefully future endeavors to continue uncovering information of the village and relaying it to the larger community. We look forward to indirectly continuing to promote community engagement and encourage more people to learn about Pine Hill Village through our temporary signage. Alumni during Reunion Weekend will have the opportunity to read the signs and learn something unknown even during their time here (or perhaps forgotten since their time here). Finally, next fall an even greater component of the student body will have the opportunity to engage with our findings in a library exhibit.

For those interested in seeing some of the items excavated from the site, we will have an exhibition of the archaeological artifacts on the 4th floor of the Laurence McKinley Gould Library from September to December 2017. We worked with Carleton’s library curator, Zoe Adler, to create this exhibit.

Credits

Thank you to Zoey Adler, Nancy Braker, Adrienne Falcon, Alex Knodell, Nat Wilson, and to the staff at Northfield News for helping and supporting our project.

This page was created by Grace Liao, Hugh O’Connor, Natalie Sainz. Noah Savage, Clarissa Smith, and Melannie Wurm.