In the summer of 2023, about seven Frederick Honors College students found themselves trekking across a vast southern Wyoming prairie, ostensibly staging a search for artifacts remaining from a 19th century transcontinental railroad. Their discoveries, however, took them much farther back in time than the Western frontier in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
“The first day they were there, the excitement was just extraordinary, because we really didn’t know the scope of the American Indian artifacts that were on the site,” recalled Nicola Foote, Frederick Honors College dean and professor at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
She accompanied the students on their first day at the site. “We knew from previous programs that there were probably some, and we also knew that in the 19th century the railroad had gone through the site.”
The first-day plan was to train on site survey methodology, which involves walking in formation. “It’s quite funny to watch,” she said. “They’re all in a line and their eyes are on the ground. And then you plant a flag anytime you see something.”
While learning how to effectively walk and search, the students remarkably planted around 300 marker flags, denoting various artifacts, including a roughly 10,000-year-old arrowhead, as determined by Jim Johnson, anthropological archaeologist and faculty lead in Pitt’s Global Experiences Office.
-Shannon O. Wells