Backfill Excavations at the Wylie House (12Mo1310), Bloomington, Monroe County, Indiana

Abstract

The Wylie House (12Mo1310) was the home of the first president of Indiana University (IU) and today is a National Register property (NR-0047, IHSSI 105-055-80110) and museum located on the IU campus. In 1995 an accessibility ramp was installed at the back (north) entrance of the Wylie House; an archaeological consultation did not take place during this process. During the construction of the ramp, four large piles of displaced dirt were created. In the spring of 2009, Baumann, along with GBL employees and volunteers from Dr. April Sievert’s Historical Archaeology class, excavated two units. Two units were placed in the first backfill pile and one was excavated. A third unit was excavated in the second backfill pile. The third backfill pile was left unexcavated. The purpose of these excavations was to recover any artifacts that were left in the piles from the un-surveyed area from the accessibility ramp. Following the conclusion of the field portion of this project, artifacts were returned to the GBL where they were cleaned. No further work was done on this collection of artifacts following their cleaning until the spring of 2014, when GBL employee Heather Alvey Scott analyzed the materials and prepared them for long-term curation.