For State Archaeologist Giovanna Peebles, archaeology is everywhere. It’s contemporary as well as ancient, and can be appreciated wherever you are.
Recently, Peebles was teaching a class to a half-dozen Williamstown High School students in the new Vermont Archaeology Heritage Center in Barre. The class was focusing on boxes of pottery shards – not ancient Abenaki pottery, but pottery that Vermont’s early settlers used. It had been discovered at an 1830 flood site in Waterbury that Peebles refers to as “Vermont’s Pompeii,” because there’s so much rubble, and therefore, so much information there.
A major flood had wrecked the farmhouse that stood on the site and buried much of the farm’s contents – including the broken pieces of pottery that the class was looking at, puzzling over.
“We’re doing archaeological discovery, all together, and I’m doing it with them, because I’ve never seen what’s in these boxes either,” Peebles declared.
After awhile, she took the class on a tour of the Archaeology Center – two large rooms in the Vermont History Center in Barre, which the Vermont Historical Society also calls home.
The building was formerly Spaulding High School, and before that, Peebles pointed out, it was the city’s grade school. Some of the parents and grandparents of the kids in the class had attended high school there.
The building was designed in the 1890s by architect Lambert Packard – a well-known architect responsible for many buildings in central and northeastern Vermont. And as the students toured the building, Peebles pointed out a window that had been bricked over – but preserved because of the building’s historical significance – when the school was expanded.
Thus, the history center itself – though only a little over a century old - presented quite a bit of archaeological information. And just down the hall from the classroom, a 400-year old Abenaki dugout canoe was on display. It had been salvaged from the bottom of Shelburne Pond.
Archaeology is, literally, everywhere, and it’s not just about artifacts, Peebles says, it’s about a continuum of human experience in Vermont – Native American, African-American, European settlers, everybody.
Her aim is to use the new Archaeology Center to teach and explore that continuum with students from grade school through graduate school. The records and artifacts now stored at the Center will allow her to teach the way she enjoys most, and the way she was teaching last week – with artifacts in hand, exploring together.
“There’s a lifetime of hands-on learning opportunities in just these two rooms,” she said.
And, she added, “In 1,000 years, our stuff will be archaeology.”
If you’d like to know more about Vermont’s archaeological past, Giovanna Peebles and others will be presenting archaeology classes, hikes, lectures and hands-on learning throughout the month of September as part of Vermont Archaeology Month. Events are listed online, and many of them will be held right at the new Vermont Archaeology Heritage Center in Barre.
