Just a few stone walls remain of what was once a stately, three-story stone mansion on the bluffs of the Kansas River near Lecompton, Kansas.
Among the ruins, amateur archeologist Debi Aaron is hunched over a dry-screening tripod carefully sifting the dirt and rock she collected from the site of a pre-Civil War home.
“Anything that stays in the screen is collected,” said Aaron, a 911 operator. “If you do it long enough, you may have an artifact left in the screen that you couldn't see otherwise because it was covered with dirt.”
Since 2009, Aaron’s been a regular fixture at the Kansas Historical Society’s archaeological field school. The Hebron, Nebraska, resident has traveled south to work more than a dozen digs, and has learned some days are more productive than others.
“So far, above the 30 centimeter level, the most exciting thing is probably a couple of square nails and a very tiny ceramic fragment that had, like, a glaze on top,” Aaron said.
In June, around 100 students and volunteers worked side-by-side with professionals to piece together history from the ruins of the home, built during the violent clashes of Bloody Kansas.
The 10-day field school, started five decades ago by the historical society and the Kansas Anthropological Association, is a chance to do real science. Attendees assist archeologists surveying sites, excavating relics, and cleaning and cataloging artifacts.
“It's my passion. It's my hobby. I love it, and it's not just the archeology, it's all the people that I meet,” she said. “You just come back year after year, and some of the same old people come back because it's what they love to do.”
At the Mount Aeolia mansion, Aaron and other volunteers are slowly digging around was once the home of Frederick P. Stanton, who served two brief stints as acting governor of the Kansas territory in 1857, before it became a state. Stanton’s structure was so tall, visitors to its roof could see Lawrence, 15 miles east, and Topeka, 19 miles west.
At the time it was built, it was one of the most expensive houses in Kansas. Wood for the interior was purchased from Pennsylvania and was brought by steam boat from St. Louis, according to the Lecompton Historical Society. Doors, mantles and paneling in each room were carved from walnut.
Assistant site supervisor Angelo Ruiz, a historical society vice president, helps new students get to work.
“We have really experienced people who've been doing this for decades — we have that extreme — all the way to the brand new person who just is (a) little interested in history and wants to come see how that process is,” Ruiz explained.
The school has received national recognition for excellence in public education. The Society for American Archaeology lauded the June digs in 2015 for “creating a community of citizens who appreciate and advocate for archaeology.”
“Our goal is to teach people about what archeologists do when they're doing excavation, so that hopefully they take that back with them and support archeology, support history, support saving these sites from just being destroyed,” Ruiz said. “Because once that information is gone, it's gone forever.”
In another corner of the ruins, Liam Bevitt, from Oskaloosa, Kansas, scraped into the soil around a large piece of corrugated metal.
“Right now we're just digging through the rubble of the house, trying to get down to the floor to see what the floor was made of,” Bevitt said. “It's definitely a little bit more challenging with all the rocks and bricks.”
Bevitt, a history major at Washburn University in Topeka, is 22 and has been coming to the field school since he was 12.
“Bleeding Kansas is my favorite time period in U.S. history, and so I knew this was going to be a pretty fun one since the guy who built this house was the territorial governor.” Bevitt said.
Nearby, Lindsborg, Kansas, volunteer Mike Wallen uncovered a handful of glass and what he suspects might be a broken chicken bone.
“This may seem insignificant when you first look at it, but even little pieces of window glass can be something that we can use for diagnostics,” Wallen said. “Because of the thickness of the glass, this might be telling us this is something from the 1850s to 1870s.”
Before each artifact is carefully bagged and catalogued for the historical society’s permanent collection, they’re delivered to a lab for analysis, where Mary Conrad supervises the cleaning.
She’s seen thousands come through the program since attending her first dig, almost 40 years ago at El Cuartelejo, built in the 1600s by the Taos Indians. The site is the northeasternmost pueblo known in North America and the only one in the state, according to the Kansas Historical Society.
“Some people just try it once, then they find out, ‘This isn't exactly what we thought it would be,’” Conrad said. It’s dirty, time-consuming work, and once you’ve answered some puzzles, others tend to pop up.
“Other researchers — five years from now, 25 years from now — may have other questions,” she said.
Despite Conrad getting hooked on archeology from that first day back in 1987, she admits it’s not for everyone.
“Archeology can be tedious,” she said. “You may dig a whole square, 10 centimeters down, and not find a whole heck of a lot.”
