A student works at the site Thursday morning
/ photo: Brian Erb
SMITHFIELD (AP) -- Some young Native Americans are digging into their shared past while taking part in an archaeological project at the site of a once-thriving Oneida Indian village that stood on a New York hilltop more than four centuries ago.
Eight teenagers, most of them Oneidas, are participating in the Indian Nation's annual summertime Youth Work/Learn program. They're spending six weeks digging at an Oneida-owned wooded site amid the rolling farmland of Madison County, a few miles south of the tribe's reservation in central New York.
Jesse Bergevin, the Oneida Nation's historical resources specialist and field archaeologist overseeing the project, said Wednesday that the village was home to the Oneidas' main community in the mid- to late-16th century. It's the third summer program students have participated in the dig at the Smithfield site, where numerous artifacts such as pottery and animal bones have been found, he said.
Bergevin said they hope to uncover evidence of some of the many longhouses that housed about 1,500 Oneidas believed to have lived on the hilltop, along with remnants of the log palisades that typically surrounded an Iroquois village.
Tribal leaders say the project teaches young Oneidas about tribal history in a unique, hands-on way.
"By having the children do this, we thought they could get a better understanding of what our nation went through the past 1,000 years," said Clint Hill, a member of the Oneida Nation's Council, the tribe's governing body.
When the first archaeological excavation was conducted at another Oneida site 17 years ago, it was a touchy subject among some tribe members who were concerned that old burial sites could be disturbed, he said.
"We had to work through that," Hill said.
"We take care to make sure that we're digging in an area where there's zero chance we're going to find any burials," Bergevin said.
The Oneidas were part of the Iroquois Confederacy spread between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. The tribe was concentrated in an area encompassing today's neighboring Oneida and Madison counties, 75 miles west of Albany. Bergevin said the Oneida village in what became Smithfield was occupied for about 25 years until around 1575, when they relocated to a nearby site after extensive cultivation depleted the soil.
For young Oneidas such as Mandi Beauvais, 17, of Stockbridge, spending hours digging in the dirt amid the summer heat and bugs isn't considered a chore.
"Every new thing we find, it's like, `Oh, wow, look at this,"' said Beauvais, a five-year dig veteran who plans to study anthropology in college. "It's something I'm really interested in and it's just fun."
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