In response to mounting southward expansion of the campus’s built environment, recent undertakings of the MSU Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) have been directed at contexts associated with the mid-twentieth century. Investigating this period has expanded the program’s inquiries and interpretative horizons beyond the university’s early history and towards overlapping processes of transformation within the institution and its surrounding landscape. Animated in part by the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, Michigan State University—then the Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science—underwent a period of dramatic spatial and demographic expansion in the decades following the Second World War. This shift in focus has entailed novel challenges and opportunities for CAP’s research practices and engagements with campus partners, undergraduate students, and wider publics. In discussing these potentialities, this paper explores prospective directions for campus archaeologies of the recent past at large land-grant universities.

Founded in 2007, Michigan State University’s (MSU) Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) aims to discover and preserve the cultural heritage of this historic university and the myriad pre-university sites existing on its campus. Inspired by a guide created by the Maryland Archaeological Conservatory (MAC) Laboratory (Cofield and Doub 2020), CAP fellows began exploring the potential of utilizing x-radiography to more accurately identify ferrous metal artifacts, discover their material composition, and improve their interpretive potential. The goals of doing so were threefold: 1) to assess the accessibility of x-ray machines on campus, 2) train archaeology graduate students in the employment of x-radiography laboratory techniques, and 3) determine the applicability of x-radiography in the identification, accessioning, and deaccessioning of artifacts excavated by CAP on MSU’s campus.

During the summer of 2023, MSU Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) crewmembers relocated and excavated foundations associated with the institution’s first astronomical observatory (1881-c.1921). The following year, the site was more intensively excavated as part of CAP’s 2024 field school. This paper provides an overview of two seasons of excavation and geophysical testing conducted at the observatory, as well as the resultant opportunities for graduate and undergraduate research, training, and public communication. We emphasize the ways in which this project built on and strengthened extant relationships and dialogue between CAP and various campus partners, including MSU’s Infrastructure Planning and Facilities, University Communications, the University Archives & Historical Collections, and the Abrams Planetarium. Reflecting on the necessity of these relationships to the project’s success, this paper considers how archaeologies of living educational institutions facilitate unique conditions and opportunities for collaboration and engagement.