IRVINE : Students Dig Their Archeology Lesson

Although he used a paint brush to gingerly sweep sand away from a piece of broken pottery, the skull jutting partway from the ground was too enticing for 8-year-old archeologist-in-training Ben Dworkin.

“A horse’s head!” he shouted as he grabbed the bone and yanked it from the sand on the patio of Westwood Basics Plus School.

The discovery helped confirmed Ben’s theory, inspired by the earlier discovery of a horseshoe, that he and his third-grade colleagues were digging the site of an ancient stable. Never mind that he thought a corroded horse’s bit was a door knocker, Ben was on to something.

That something was archeology.

Christine Nelson, an archeologist and associate curator of the USC Archaeological Research Collection in Los Angeles, spent three consecutive Fridays with the school’s third- and fourth-graders, showing them how archeologists work and what that work reveals about the past. Monday was a time for the students to get dirty and practice what they had learned.

Groups of students dug into various “rooms” of a simulated 2,000-year-old settlement in Jordan. The rooms were actually shallow squares of sand chock full of real and re-created artifacts Nelson had hidden earlier.

“I want you to dig like professional archeologists--very slowly and very carefully,” Nelson told the students before they began.

Students rotated shifts as diggers, sifters, artists to draw the discoveries and a recorder to write down the finds.

“We think this is the kitchen because we’ve found pottery and a lot of bones,” said Andrew Kim, 8, digging through a square of sand.

Joey Arrasmith and fellow team members Adam Roggero, Sterling Prentice and Spencer Sutcliffe thought they had stumbled upon the weapons-storage room. “This, I think, goes to a spear and this is a tomahawk . . . and that’s an arrow head,” Joey said.

Monday’s lessons were meant to teach students a systematic approach to uncovering artifacts and to figure out what an ancient society was like, Nelson said.

Nelson will meet with the students for a final time Friday to help figure out what the artifacts reveal.

Nelson offers the program to schools for a fee to teach the basics of archeology. Parents paid for the program at the school.

“It is a wonderful way to learn science,” fourth-grade teacher Kathy Kayiran said. “The kids have been so enthralled about this. I’ll bet we’ll have a couple of archeologists coming out of this school because this is such an unusual experience.”