[DRUMS PLAYING]
ETHAN THAI: So right now, we're sweeping a 100-foot by 100-foot
area with metal detectors looking for things,
such as iron, musket shot, canister,
any remnants of the battle.
NATHAN ARRINGTON: We are here today
at the Princeton Battlefield with Humanities 350,
a course called "Battle Lab," whose goal
is to investigate the Princeton Battlefield,
to teach students about archaeology hands on,
and to get them to engage with cultural heritage
and preservation right here in their own backyard.
RACHAEL DELUE: Nathan said, hey, how about a class where we
excavate something near campus?
And he said, what about the Princeton Battlefield?
And I said, that's perfect.
You're an archaeologist.
I am an art historian that studies early America.
What if we bring our methods together,
what if we bring the tools of our trade
together, to see if we can unlock the Battle of Princeton
to bring new information, new knowledge,
and make the picture of what really happened here that day
more clear?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CLARE COOK: There's definitely a really wide variety
of majors represented in the class, which is pretty cool.
So there's people like me that had no archaeology --
and I haven't taken any other history classes here --
and then there's other people who
are in the archaeology certificate program
or have done history.
So it is really neat to get different insights
into those things.
RACHAEL DELUE: I work on the history of American art,
and working on the history of American art
means that I have to be a specialist in American history.
And so I'm always thinking about the larger contexts in which
art is produced, and Princeton's museum
owns an incredibly interesting painting
by Charles Willson Peale of George Washington
at the Battle of Princeton.
CLARE COOK: So yeah, there is a lot
of interesting things from the painting
that I don't think I would have noticed myself.
So I understood that, back then, you could actually
see Nassau Hall from the battlefield,
and this is even reflected in some
of the artwork we've looked at.
A lot of times, the battle is portrayed from the field,
but you can see Nassau Hall in the background.
NATHAN ARRINGTON: Across the road,
we're doing metal detection, very systematic metal detection
to try to recover artifacts from the battle,
but also from the periods before and after the battle.
[METAL DETECTOR SOUNDING]
ETHAN THAI: We could have something else right here.
SPEAKER 1: OK.
[BEEP]
Here we go.
ETHAN THAI: So this is a cut nail, an extremely rusted cut
nail.
Having not taken a history class in quite a long time,
I thought it'd be good to just learn more
about the American Revolution, the start of this nation.
But also alongside with that, I do
enjoy the mechanical, the technical side
of things too and using technology like ground
penetrating radar earlier, metal detectors here,
and other tools in the excavation, archaeology field.
It's a great intersection of everything.
NATHAN ARRINGTON: A ground penetrating radar
is a noninvasive way to cover a lot of territory
and try to find out some more information about what
happened here and how it was interpreted.
RACHAEL DELUE: We want students to have moments where they're
digging deep into time and into the past,
and they confront something that is wholly unfamiliar
and have these transformative moments when they're there
looking at something that they thought
was simply a plot of grass.
And by excavating it both literally and metaphorically,
they're encountering something altogether new.
And that's transformative in the sense
that, all of a sudden, their world
becomes a different one -- their world now,
but also their sense of their place in history.
So excavation here is literal as well as metaphorical.
It's a matter of what it means to produce knowledge,
but also self-awareness and a sense of ourselves
as humans in the 21st century.
[MUSIC PLAYING]