Kelly Goldberg once spent two summers on an archaeological dig at a Viking settlement in Iceland. Now the Honors College instructor is digging in the dirt right here on USC's Horseshoe, finding artifacts that offer clues to the university's past.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Remembering the Days, where we explore the stories and talk with the people who are part of the rich history of the University of South Carolina. I'm Evan Faulkenberry and today Chris and I are talking with somebody who likes to get their hands dirty.
Chris Horn: Kelly Goldberg is the director of the Public History Lab. She's an instructor in the Honors College. And she has been digging on the Horseshoe, looking for artifacts out on the Horseshoe.
Evan Faulkenbury: Yeah, she is an archaeologist with a ton of experience from Viking settlements to the American South. And she's led some Honors classes in the past with digging on the Horseshoe to uncover the hidden history of South Carolina College and the University of South Carolina. She's doing one currently now during the Spring 2025 semester, but she's also done some previously and she's going to talk to us a little bit about what they've uncovered.
ChrisHorn: Let's get into the conversation. And I should mention as well that the public is invited to take part in these digs. They can get in touch with her if they want to volunteer with that. But, let’s get started with today's conversation.
Well, tell us about how you got started with doing digs on the Horseshoe. I mean, what prompted that?
Kelly Goldberg: We're on a historic campus. So, considering that the university was founded in 1801, we have buildings constructed as soon as 1805. There is a long-term history here that I think a lot of people don't think about, beyond the architectural history of the buildings that are still standing.
There's kind of a mantra that, oh, there's been so much construction and so much work. Surely there's none of that history left in the ground. And so, from the archaeology standpoint, we wanted to demonstrate that that's likely not true. That we know there are structures were on campus that there would would be traces of archaeologically.
Over the years when I was in grad school, I had an internship at SCIAA ??? for a while, and there were a couple of days, you know, we'd be sitting at SCIAA and someone would come in with artifacts that they were doing construction projects on campus.
And, oh, look, they found these historic glass bottles as they were excavating or as they were, you know, building a parking lot. And to date, there's really no process for preserving archaeological materials on campus prior to those construction projects that are going on. And so there had been a series of these kind of accidental findings and, and Adam and others and I thought, well, why don't we see if we can be pre-emptive about it and if we can do excavations of the historic spaces before these projects happen, that that's a better way. One of the problems is, you know, even if people collect the things that they find in archaeology, it's the context that matters. And so it's not just that we save the artifacts themselves, but we need to know were they found in features, can we figure out what buildings they were associated with? And so it's really important that we do systematic archaeological investigations prior to things being disturbed. And so at that point, I was actually able to start this project because of support from the Honors College here at South Carolina. The Honors College is really supportive of experiential learning classes, and they are able to kind of help provide funding to and creative course scheduling that allows that.
And when I say, hey, I want to dig some pretty substantial holes in the ground for the over the course of five months — is that cool? There's a lot of steps that have to be taken there. And so we worked with facilities for several months before the excavation started this past January, and they've been great in helping us to figure out, you know, what considerations we need to take, safety protocol and how we need to to work with facilities.
Chris Horn: What kinds of things have you all found and what do those artifacts tell us about the history of the university?
Kelly Goldberg: I'm interested in focusing on doing archaeology of the university of spaces that are affiliated with those who are underrepresented in the university's history. And so we're specifically trying to locate spaces that are tied to the history of individuals who were enslaved at the university, who there's just not as much information in the documentary records.
There is an 1884 historic map, a fire insurance map. The Sanborn map, which I have here today. And so there was a history class years ago taught by Dr. Bob Weyeneth and he had the grad students, one of them actually overlaid that map onto a map of modern campus.
And so we can see where the structures that existed in 1884 overlay on contemporary campus. And then we focused on which of those structures we think might have likely been associated with people who were enslaved and which ones are in places where there haven't been buildings built on top of them. And so we have on the map we located eight different locations where there were outbuildings on campus. Some of these outbuildings, the function wasn't definitively known. Others of them, we have descriptions that talk about them as being either support buildings like kitchens for some of the housing and some of them are explicitly described as housing for people who are enslaved on campus. There's the one structure that is still standing behind the current president's house. But one of the things that we're seeking to do is demonstrate that there's history beyond what's still standing. And so where we are working is, last semester in this coming semester is right in front of the McKissick Museum, where the first president's house was built.
And based on that fire insurance map, we know there were two outbuildings behind that president's house. And so we know, again, from documentation that those outbuildings, one of them did serve as a kitchen that was primarily to support the president and his family and whoever else was living in that house. And then they both were potentially used as enslaved housing as well. And in the spring and in the summer, when I taught a field school at that location, we identified remnants that definitely support the kitchen identification. We found processed animal bone. A lot of dishware, ceramics. We also found one thing that was a little bit surprising to us. We thought we were hoping to find house foundations. So look, confirmation of this is where the boundaries of the house were. And one thing that we initially thought was part of a foundation wall turned out to be a cap on a water main that we did some research on. And we believe that water main was installed sometime between 1818 and 1821, right behind the first president's house, when the city of Columbia actually brought the first water system to different parts of the city.
Chris Horn: In 1818 — there were water lines?
Kelly Goldberg: They were not to indoor plumbing, but water lines that would have brought water to central well locations to make those wells more accessible, to have more localized wells than not and reduce distance.
One of our students did a deep dive history project, and she found documentation from the city where they talked about bringing these water lines to. I can't remember the exact language. I think it was described as, you know, places they deemed fragile or at risk. And so they talk about bringing water to I think it was the hospital, the university, and the mental institution up on Bull Street. So it was interesting that the university was called out as a location that the city deemed needing access to free water for the students and the faculty here.
If our focus is looking at the stories of people who are enslaved here on campus, what might that mean to their daily lives? If the installation of this water main meant a change in the accessibility and ease of access to water, you know, well, we don't have documentation. Might bringing water to the house have been part of their duties? And how would this have changed what that looked like? And so we talked about ways that we can use different lenses to interpret this history, depending on whose perspective or whose vantage point we're thinking about.
Evan Faulkenbury: And so you all have done two digs, one in spring of ‘24, and now another one about to happen in the spring of ‘25. Is that right?
Kelly Goldberg: So we kind of did them as two separate digs. So we had in the spring of ‘24, we did the the Honors College class that went from January through April. And then in the summer of ‘24, I did an archaeology field school. And so for that part, students spent three weeks continuing the work of the students in the spring.
With the spring class, one thing that we did that was really exciting was we were able to work with the McKissick Museum, and they allowed us to put on a living exhibit. And so we had on the second floor of the McKissick, we had as we conducted excavations, students built exhibits that we changed out every couple of weeks with new artifacts that we were finding.
It was a great way that we were able to share this out with the public. We know that everybody couldn't come by during the time of our excavations. And so having that opportunity for students to put on display not just the artifacts that they were finding, but they made half of the exhibit about the process, and they put in materials that talked about the excavations and the GPR work and all of those things that go into the actual excavation work. And then they they pivoted and they talked about how they interpret that work into our major findings.
Chris Horn: Kelly, can you talk about the opportunity coming up for members of the public to get involved in the dig?
Kelly Goldberg: So this coming spring in 2025, we are going to be doing repeating the Honors College class. So we'll be conducting a larger scale excavation in front of the McKissick Museum from January through the end of April. And we will have throughout that time period, several public days where members of the public are going to be invited to come and actually watch the ongoing investigations and maybe jumping on a screen or two here and there and help with that work. But we will also have regular volunteer lab nights, where we'll invite members of the public to come join us in lab and help us to wash and process some of the artifacts that are coming up out of the Horseshoe excavations.
We're going to take the artifacts that we recover. We're washing them, cataloging them and then we're going to put them in curation. They'll be curated at SCIIA in the state's curation facilities, and those artifacts will remain open to the public and future researchers. So if someone has a research question in 50 years from now that these artifacts could help answer, you know, in case future construction had gone on and that site might be destroyed, those artifacts are now protected and preserved and can help support that future work. So I think archaeology is not just kind of a static research project, but it's an ongoing way of preserving this information for now and for future researchers.
Evan Faulkenbury: What do you know about some of the digs that have happened much further in the past before your time here?
Kelly Goldberg: Dr. Stanley South did a couple of summers or a couple years of excavations in the 1970s. And one of his primary goals was to locate where some of the wells were on campus. And he did some work abutting a couple of the building foundations that are on the historic Horseshoe components. And he did his excavations at a much larger scale than we did ours. So he had a long-term summer field school that he ran. And I think they were able to open some pretty sizable blocks, which again, when you're looking for a house foundation, is critical to be able to expose a large swath of land there.
It's been 50 years since. And it's weird to think about that because, you know, I met Stan and talked to him and so it's very kind of jolting to think there was a 50-year gap between his excavations and our excavations.
Chris Horn: I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around the fact that there were water pipes in 1818, but, what other kinds of artifacts have y'all found? I'm sure there's been some interesting things that you found.
Kelly Goldberg: Yeah, and a lot of them are interesting for different reasons. The things that I think are interesting are, you know, when we find cut nails and then we can confirm that the, the layer of soil we found where that cut nail is, you know, date to a certain time period because cut nails or square nails are only made through the late 1800s, maybe very early 1900s. So that gives us a timeline. So for me, that's fascinating. Or, you know, the ceramic plates that we find that have a maker's mark stamped on the bottom. And so then we can ask or we can learn things about, you know, they give us a time constraint. We know certain manufacturers make those, those plates only until a certain time period. But it also tells us things about, well, what were the preferences of the people who lived here? Were they buying, you know, did the president who lived here at the time specifically want pink stamped china or, you know, what were their what were those selections going on? Also, it can give us access to what types of food were being eaten if we don't have, you know, receipt books or recipe books, if we find a lot of bowls, we can say, oh, we know they're eating a lot of soup. So those types of things are interesting. We find a lot of, you know, obviously a lot of structural materials. So we've been finding a lot of brick, mortar, um, a lot of slate from roofing tiles can help us answer questions about that.
We have been finding some personal objects as well. So we found a couple buttons in this collection on campus — glass buttons from clothing or from other ornamental things. And those to me are also the interesting pieces because those are the things we can tie to people who are in these spaces. We found a Kappa Alpha pin and then through some research, we've discovered that the design on this Kappa Alpha pin has been used since the fraternity was started in the 1860s.
And so that allowed us to have kind of more nuanced conversations about looking at the history of that fraternity and kind of the social factors that played into that and thinking about the complexity of where we located it.
So that pin we actually found in an excavation that we did right next to Rutledge College. While the history of that fraternity has changed over time, initially when it was founded in the '60s, it was a decidedly Confederate-supporting fraternity. And so to find a pin from a fraternity that supports segregation right next to the Rutledge College, which served as the Normal School for a period of time, which was one of the first locations that Black students could actually come and learn was really culturally significant to think about the layers of conversation that that pin plays into on a space where we believe could have housed people who were enslaved. There's a lot of historical complexity to unpack there.
One of the things that we have been finding, as I mentioned, in architectural materials, we've been finding a lot of bricks. We find bricks that have handprints in them from the individuals who made them. That's one of the things we do know that there were several brick manufacturers here in Columbia, actually pretty close to where campus is. There's mention of individuals who were enslaved on USC's campus that were leased out or would sometimes work at those brick manufacturer locations. And so it's logical that the university is getting brick from those locations.
Evan Faulkenbury: So, Kelly, for those who might be thinking or maybe don't think a whole lot about archaeology, especially at the University of South Carolina, where it's not exactly thought of, probably, as an archaeological site. What would you say to folks who are wondering about what's the whole point of this?
Kelly Goldberg: That is a great question. I think archaeology can really demonstrate, you know, like, like we were saying when students didn't realize, oh, that I walk over space every day where there's something used to be here. And so archaeology can, can really showcase how landscapes have changed over time, how campus has changed over time. And that's important beyond just the physical element of, oh, there used to be a building here and then there wasn't, but that can get us talking about how roles have changed over time, how are what's been socially acceptable has changed over time. And so here we're using archaeology as a way to draw the public's attention to the history of enslavement here on campus, and not even just enslavement, but to the history of how people were treated differently in the past, of how people engaged differently in the past.
Chris Horn: Well, Kelly, thanks very much for joining us. It's been fascinating.
Kelly Goldberg: Thank you for having me.
Chris Horn: So that was kind of fun hearing about all the artifacts that Kelly Goldberg and her students are finding around campus. I can't wait to hear more about what they find and once they get it catalogued and maybe have it on exhibit at some point.
We are going to take a little bit of a break from our regular episodes this spring and have a special episode coming up on a student group called A Touch of Faith Gospel Choir. It's a choir that dates back about 50 years and it not only is going to be fun to listen to because this group can harmonize like crazy, but just hearing the story about how they were established in the 1970s is pretty cool and i think people will find it not just a fun listen, but an interesting listen as well.
Evan Faulkenbury: Chris, did you join them in the choir?
Chris Horn: I cannot carry a tune in a bucket. But I had a lot of fun listening to the practice and I went to an event when they were singing at a church here in town. I think listeners are really going to enjoy that one. So that's coming up on the next episode of Remembering the Days.