Excavations under Harvard University, the world’s richest educational establishment, have revealed remains of the much smaller and infinitely poorer college that stood there in the 17th and 18th centuries. Among the finds have been building materials, domestic rubbish, and several pieces of lead printer’s type.

Harvard, founded in the reign of Charles I and named after John Harvard, a Cambridge graduate who left his books to the young college, is centred on Harvard Yard, a series of grassy quadrangles enclosed by red-brick buildings such as Massachusetts Hall, built in 1718 and the oldest surviving structure. “Seventeenth- century Harvard Yard included not only the Old College, which was the oldest university building in the country, but also the Harvard Indian College,” said Professor William Fash, the director of the Harvard Peabody Museum.

“Built around 1655 as a place to train Native students within Harvard, the Indian College is of special interest as the first university-level institution in the Americas focused on Native people,” said Professor Fash, although several centuries of activity mean that “the yard is a very dense and overwrought landscape.”

The conjectured location of the college at the southwest corner of Harvard Yard was surveyed using ground-penetrating radar, suggesting a high concentration of artefacts and a possible foundation. Excavations by students this autumn as part of an archaeology course showed, however, that this was debris from the construction of Matthews Hall in 1871. “No remnants of earlier Harvard remain here,” said Dr Christina Hodge, who directed this year’s Harvard Yard Archaeology Project.

Slightly farther east the team had better luck: a sheet of midden from the 18th and early 19th centuries, probably “an accumulation of general trash in an open space between buildings”, included redeposited 17th-century materials. Among them were five pieces of printer’s lead type.

Two were blanks for creating spaces, one was an “M” and the last consisted of an “H” and a full stop fused. “The Harvard printing presses, the first in the colonies, were housed in two known locations near the find spot, in the college president’s house and at the Indian College,” said Dr Hodge. “Harvard printed the first books in North America, including a Bible in the local Algonquian language.”

Roof tiles, glass and lead from leaded windows and domestic rubbish, including pottery, glass bottles, a pipe stem and animal bones, seem to date to around the time that the Old College and Indian College were dismantled at the end of the 17th century. One intriguing find was a fragment from an Iberian maiolica vessel, which “raises questions of illicit trade, as British colonists’ trade with countries other than England was heavily restricted”, Dr Hodge’s team conclude.

“The location and number of outbuildings in 17th and 18th-century Harvard Yard is poorly known: locating the extent of the Old College is a high priority, to reconstruct the configuration of 17th-century Harvard in real space,” they report. The investigations will continue in 2009.

Britain’s farmers

The first farmers established themselves in Britain close to 6,000 years ago, a new radiocarbon date study has shown. Agriculture swept rapidly across Britain and into Ireland within decades, and the new economy seems to have been associated with the first megalithic tombs.

Neolithic charred cereal remains “are far more widespread across the British Isles than earlier surveys suggest,” Dr Alex Brown reports in Antiquity. “In addition, many of these sites have associated radiocarbon dates,” including high- resolution accelerator (AMS) dates on cereal grain themselves, rather than just charcoal from the same context.

Overall, Dr Brown says: “The evidence from charred cereals suggests cultivation no earlier than 3950BC and certainly no later than 3630BC. The earliest dates from charred cereals are a hundred years later than the earliest dates derived from charcoal, of around 4050BC.” He suggests limited cultivation of cereals, which would have been introduced from across the Channel after spreading across Europe from the Near East, by 3950-3800BC, with more widespread farming between 3800 and 3000BC before a significant reduction, still unexplained.

The dating evidence from megalithic tombs in the Cotswold and Severn areas suggests construction beginning around 3800BC, with recents dates for Neolithic funerary activity at Burn Ground, Gloucester, as early as 3930BC and one even older date of 4230-3970BC “that may represent long-term curation of ancestral remains”. Pottery also seems to have become established in Britain at this time.

What is striking, Dr Brown notes, is how all this happens more or less simultaneously in all parts of Britain and in Ireland. “The radiocarbon dating evidence from cereals, burial monuments and domestic structures could be taken to suggest a transitional period of as little as 150-200 years between 4000 and 3800BC before a Neolithic lifestyle became a more established feature. During this time, the Mesolithic communities experimented with and then adopted agriculture more rapidly than some scholars have proposed.”

The farming communities that for millennia formed the foundation of the British way of life until the Industrial Revolution thus seem to have begun some 60 centuries ago, although Dr Brown points out that “precise dating remains a key research aim for prehistoric studies”.

Antiquity 81: 1042-52.