Middletown Materials Class Posts Final Projects Online

The Middletown Materials: Archaeological Analysis class (ANTH 227) presented their final projects May 5-7 in the new Cross Street Archaeology Lab. The class was taught by Sarah Croucher, assistant professor of anthropology, assistant professor of archaeology, assistant professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies.

“The class has been doing fantastic work on beginning to reexamine archaeological contexts explored in the late 1970s by Professor Stephen Dyson and students,” she says. “They’ve had a tough job as the first class to begin working with this material, but have been making great progress with the artifacts and with working on associated archival information.”

Presentations were held across two class sessions, and included work on advertising in late 18th and early 19th century Middletown, the relationship of Middletown newspapers to the Magill site inhabitants, queer Marxist investigations of historical archaeology in Middletown, interpretations of bottles found in the rebuilding of the Wesleyan boathouse, and a tour of the remaining historical buildings on Wesleyan’s campus and their relationship to the changing history of Middletown.

Their work is published online at http://middletownmaterials.research.wesleyan.edu/student-posts/.