This summer, like the three summers before it, Sissel Schroeder ’83 found herself digging trenches—methodical, razor-straight trenches from which dirt was excavated by shovel and Marshalltown trowel. Schroeder, professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been digging in Aztalan State Park near Lake Mills, Wis., since 2013 to learn more about the Native peoples who lived there a millennium ago.
The confluence of cultures at the site is of great interest to Schroeder, who studies the social and political systems of complex nonstate societies that archaeologists call Mississippian. “Judging from the pottery,” Schroeder says, “this was a site where people from at least two different cultural traditions lived together. We see evidence that there was a peaceful relationship between these people, and we want to understand how they forged and maintained this kind of relationship through daily practices. It’s an issue that’s really resonant today when we’re seeing a backlash against immigrants in many parts of the world.”
Schroeder doesn’t excavate by herself, of course. Each summer, along with one or two grad students, she brings six to eight undergraduates with her. She explains, “We’re working on helping them develop the physical skills of excavating carefully, but we’re also training them to see subtle differences in the color and texture of soil that might indicate that they are starting to encounter a trash pit or something else that happened at the site. And those subtle differences in soil color and texture are not something that students are trained for in the classroom—you can only learn this through experience.”
Because the group excavates in a state park that’s open to the public, the site gets a lot of visitors—more than 100 some days. “We’re very transparent about what we’re doing. We want to engage visitors to help them understand some of the heritage that’s in their own backyard,” Schroeder says. “The middle school teachers who visited the site this summer were so excited to see that it was an active learning process and that it integrated knowledge that is typically taught in a very segmented way in K–12 settings.”
Those teachers are in luck, since Schroeder and a colleague are partnering with a local school district to develop curricular materials for middle school students ba
sed on the Aztalan site. The materials will draw together geology, the scientific process, journaling and writing, the mathematics of laying out excavation units and analyzing cultural material, some zoology related to investigating animal bones, and art—the ability to draw artifacts and make maps or to illustrate what students think the community looked like when people were living there.
That last bit is something that Schroeder’s excavations are calling into question. “We are rewriting the understanding that we have of life at Aztalan,” she says. “What we’re finding is that the history of activities at this site was incredibly dynamic. Walls were built and dismantled, the occupied area expanded and contracted. The internal organization of the site really needs to be reassessed. For the students, it’s really exciting to be a part of a project that’s revealing new information, things that weren’t expected by the professional community.”