Prior to William Pereira’s grand architectural interventions in higher education, the land that would become the UCI campus housed an outpost of the Irvine Ranch operations. Colloquially known as “The Farm,” this area’s incorporation as part of the campus has served as an interim space. This paper details the design and implementation of a fieldwork-based course entitled “I DIG UCI” in which students explore how this space offers intervenes in the totalizing forms of land development embodied by the broader Irvine "Master Plan." At stake is whether such archaeological engagements with the site signal its fixity as a locus of heritage, or affirm its interim nature as a non-regularized space on a public university campus. At what point do ruins simply need to be dealt with? For students in the course, their participation - learning by doing - allows them to evaluate the role archaeology plays in negotiating that terrain.

During Fall 2019, the University of Idaho offered an eight-week methods course focused on surveying and excavating the grounds of a local high school in downtown Moscow, Idaho. In walking distance from UI's campus, Moscow High School offered a unique setting for affordable hands-on training during the regular semester schedule. The project also resulted in student research into local histories, increased public education and engagement, and fostered inter-institution collabboration and recruitment efforts. Now in its second field season, the MHS field school is an example of how local campus-based field work is rewriting traditional training models in the discipline

The University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) has been designated as the “growth campus” of the CU system. UCCS occupies land once home to indigenous tribes, sheep herders, and a tuberculosis sanatorium. As a result, UCCS administration turned to the Anthropology department to help mitigate the impacts of growth on our campus cultural resources. The department, in consultation with the SHPO, realized the campus needed a management plan to avoid overtaxing the archaeology faculty and guide the growth in an ethical and legal manner. This led to a State Historical Fund grant designed to support an academic/CRM collaboration project with a field school to create this plan. In 2015, we started that multi-year collaboration to create a Cultural Resources Management Plan for the campus. Here we share some lessons learned from this process including insights into our collaborative process, challenges, successes, pedagogy, and future steps.

Prior to its 1967 founding, the lands of Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM) were agricultural fields cultivated by enslaved laborers, and later tenant farmers. Maps, photographs, and above-ground features have led to the identification of three mid-20^th century residential sites. By using our campus as an outdoor classroom, AUM students have had hands-on opportunities to explore and engage with the archaeological record that otherwise would not have been economically possible for most. Not only have they learned basic field methods, which led to employment for some, but they also learned about our institution’s history. Through campus events, students have shared what they learned with a variety of campus constituents, providing all with a better understanding of our campus’s tenant farming past, its historical landscape, and the people who lived and worked on its lands.

Fall 2023 marks the second season of the University of Kentucky Campus Archaeology project. The project focuses primarily on a late-19^th century house and surrounding lot on the periphery of campus. The building has served as a private family home, student housing, and eventually became university office and classroom space. This project introduces students to field and laboratory methods in archaeology, and addresses questions of urbanizing southern landscapes in the post-bellum period, the displacement of Black communities in American cities at the turn of the twentieth century, and the persistent life use of the site by students from the early twentieth to twenty-first centuries. This paper offers a reflection on the pedagogical approach to a growing experiential historical archaeology program at the university, and one that specifically seeks to challenge the geographic and financial obstacles that prevent students from gaining traditional field training.

Practicing and teaching community-based archaeology on sites associated with the history of the university is a unique opportunity for students to participate in authentic research and as stakeholders of campus heritage. A case study will be presented of the work at the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters site on the Stanford campus. The project has a complex network of collaborating scholars and stakeholders and is embedded in transnational discussions of Chinese diaspora historical contributions in North America. The current challenge is to push through the analysis of the assemblage to address these larger questions, and in particular to engage students in retelling the story of the university to highlight the contributions of Chinese immigrants to the building of the campus, and to address discriminatory practices that excluded them from that history to this moment.

How can archaeological pedagogy provide students a greater understanding of the campus they call home? Archaeology classes give undergraduates a greater stake in their surroundings through combining campus history and archaeological theory, methods, and training for the field. These engagements are an opportunity to learn from students about their relationship to campus and supply a setting for them to learn from each other through the questions they ask about their institution. Using examples from UC Berkeley and UC Irvine, this paper reviews the challenges and successes of teaching institutional and local history through archaeological activities. Case studies include the use of historical structures, the legacy of campus excavations and collections, and examinations of contemporary material culture. Further, this paper considers how to teach similar material through remote or hybrid instruction and the ways this format has created accessible alternatives and practical forms of inclusion.