The UConn Anthropology and the Connecticut Office of State Archeology will offer a field school in Contact Period & Battlefield Archaeology focused on the John Hollister site in Glastonbury, Conn.

The field school is designed as a four-week intensive program in archaeological field methods and laboratory analysis. The short but intensive field school is intended to give students who successfully complete the program an opportunity to obtain employment with local Cultural Resource Management firms who will be seeking field technicians for an anticipated busy field season.

The four-week, four-credit field school will include training in archaeological field survey and excavation, artifact conservation, cataloging, identification and analysis of 17th Century Euro-American and Indigenous material culture and analysis of primary sources. Training will also be provided in research and field methods specific to battlefield archaeology including use of military terrain models, metal detecting survey, and GPS/GIS applications. The field school provides a unique opportunity for students to work on a nationally significant collaborative research project, participate in training workshops in laboratory and research methods, metal detecting and Ground Penetrating Radar.

The Hollister site was occupied between 1651-1711 and consists of several English domestic structures that have yielded thousands of seventeenth-century Euro-American and Native artifacts and food remains. Evidence suggests, and hopefully will be confirmed this season, that Natives from the local Wangunk Tribe lived at the site for a period of time. Dozens of impacted musket balls were also recovered from metal detector surveys suggesting the settlement may have been attacked during King Philip’s War (1675-1676). The focus of field excavations during the summer of 2023 will be to investigate several of the English domestic structures, identify the military aspects of the site, and delineate the Native occupation.