Oneida teens unearth layers of their history

They stand about 13 yards apart, clusters of teens on a hilltop, their sneakers sunk in dirt, their bodies obscured by chest-high weeds. Oneida Lake glimmers in the distance, a wide streak of blue beyond acres of farmland dotted with silver silos and dark red barns. From the hilltop, they can see for 15 miles; underground, they can travel through 300 years.

Wearing baseball caps and visors, listening to hip-hop on headphones and rap music on a boombox, these 10 native-American students are unearthing the remains of their ancestors' 17th-century village. The beads, animal bones, and pottery shards they find are "wicked" and "cool" - lingo that betrays both a firm entrenchment in their own culture and a shy fascination with one that came before.

The teens are part of Youth Work Learn, a program teaching job skills to young native Americans - and, for the crew assigned to Prof. Jordan Kerber's archaeology dig, helping them literally get in touch with their past.

"It opens up history to them," says Dr. Kerber, a professor of anthropology at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. He has led these two-week summer digs since 1995 - first on land near Colgate, and since 1998, on land recently reacquired by the Oneida nation, 20 miles away.

So far, his crews have found mainly trade items - smoking pipes and beads made in Venice or Amsterdam that Europeans exchanged for beaver pelts or other goods; metal scraps shaped into pipes, beads, or weapons; and shell beads called wampum, manufactured along the East Coast and used as currency. Animal bones and teeth are plentiful, and one teen archaeologist found a corn kernel from the 1660s. Kerber's groups have also discovered two cassock buttons, part of a Jesuit ring, and endless flakes of chert (remnants from the carving of stone tools).

"You can't get a better history class than this," says Randy Phillips, manager of Youth Work Learn and a sixth-grade teacher in Oneida. "These kids are learning more than they'd ever learn in public school."

But they also have to shed some misconceptions. "For most of the kids," Mr. Phillips says, "their idea of archaeology is 'Indiana Jones.' We have to bring them down from that."

After a one-day orientation, Kerber puts them to work on small test pits, sifting dirt through waist-high swinging sieves and cataloging every find. In addition to field work, the crew spends two days cleaning artifacts in Colgate labs.

In 1998, when Kerber's initial grant from Colgate and the John Ben Snow Memorial Foundation expired, he asked the Oneida Nation if he could dig on their territory, with their teens, and with Oneida funds. "I thought it would make sense for Oneida students to work on [ancestral] sites, discovering objects they'd heard their grandfathers talk about," Kerber says. The Nation has footed most of the costs.

Through field work, the teens learn the painstaking process of excavation, honing their archaeological eyes.

Dakota Bluewolf is something of a celebrity here. In his first two days on site, he discovers beads, pottery, chert flakes, charcoal, and deer and fish bone. Hunched over his screen, he announces each find with the nonchalance of a curator - "coal flakes," he'll say quietly, or, "it's a bead." On the second day, Dakota unearths a 17th-century musket ball. On the third, he finds a tiny coil of brass, the smallest one Kerber has seen.

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