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The past speaks at Waterford
Artifacts, those bits and pieces of our past, were front and center in Cory Joseph's kindergarten class at Waterford Elementary School June 11.
Every artifact has a story to tell, said archaeologist David Clark. He was Waterford's artist in residence for the week, taking his communicative artifacts to every classroom, kindergarten through fifth grade. All the children trekked down the hill to the village Friday and delved through boxes full of artifacts collected by residents over the years.
“This is a big part of my public outreach, via the Loudoun Archaeological Foundation, to raise awareness of our heritage and archaeology across Loudoun,” Clark said. “This was a program specifically linking the elementary students to their local heritage in and around the cultural landscape of a historic village established in 1733.”
Animal bones tell us two things, Clark pointed out – what our ancestors were eating, and which animals lived in the area and eventually died of old age.
The students weren't the only ones learning. Clark came away with reports from his students of more than 40 locations of artifacts, old foundations and historic dumps in the vicinity of his students' homes.
For the kindergartners, Clark brought a box full of artifacts he has collected from a 125-year-old farm not far from the village – a spoon handle, a cow tooth, a pottery shard, an oyster shell.
“Are there any oceans around here? No, yet every site in Loudoun has oyster shells. Your ancestors loved oysters, and they got here by wagon from Alexandria.”
Clark's presentation wove in the Standards of Learning the children will be grappling with for the rest of their school careers. Each kept an archaeology journal of drawings and notes for the week. History, reading, writing, science, art and math all made their way into the lesson.
“Archaeologists love math,” Clark said.
Clark is executive director of the Loudoun Archaeological Foundation. He teaches historic preservation, focused on Loudoun sites, at Northern Virginia Community College.
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