BALTIMORE — The smallest markings can be a clue about what was here centuries ago. April is Maryland Archaeology Month.
A professor at Towson University is unearthing layers of prehistorical artifacts, one dig at a time.
“If you’re in the middle of the woods and no one is living there today and you find a bunch of daffodils that means someone was living there,” said Dr. Katherine Sterner, the founder and director of the Baltimore Community Archaeology Lab.
She started the program after realizing there wasn’t a lot of funding behind local volunteer programs like the Herring Run Archaeology Project.
“There was a real void in the archaeology community in Baltimore,” said Dr. Sterner.
Sterner and her students do field work in Baltimore city and county parks, studying pre-historic Native American artifacts.
“We found a couple stains in the dirt that look like posts where a single post structure would have been built from 1,000 to 11,000 years ago,” said Dr. Sterner.
“I couldn’t sit at a desk writing a paper all day so what I like about archaeology is that it’s really hands on,” said Fidel Green, a senior at Towson University.
The program gives students hands on experience in and out of the classroom.
“We support ourselves through contracts with things like the Maryland Department of Natural Resources or county government. If they need archaeological work done, they can hire myself and my students to do that work which gives our students hands on paid archaeological work after they graduate,” said Dr. Sterner.