Doctoral student Katy Meyers, MSU’s student archaeologist, said she and a group of other students and alumni have begun excavating near the MSU Museum, where the university’s first dormitory is located underground. After construction workers discovered a bridge underground near the Music Building on Tuesday morning, she said the group likely will begin digging nearby at the end of this week as well.

“We’re always around,” Meyers said. “Any time there’s construction going on on campus, we are here to make sure that they don’t disturb anything historical or prehistoric.”

The student archaeologists have been digging up the dormitory piece by piece for years, originally beginning in 2005. The bridge once crossed the former location of part of the Red Cedar River, which professor William Beal relocated himself in the 1800s.

“Beal saw this campus as his laboratory, and he … did whatever he thought should be done,” said anthropology professor Lynne Goldstein, the founder and director of MSU’s archaeology program. “He was really annoyed about his gardens being flooded, so he rerouted the creek so it wasn’t flooded.”

Despite the extensive work on the old dorm, Meyers said the crew will search for missing walls, as well as more typical dorm-worthy items.

“We’re finding a lot of artifacts that relate to the dormitory, mainly from the 1850s to 1880s era: a lot of ceramics, glass, nails,” she said.

With each artifact that is found, there is a research process involved, Meyers said.

“Any artifact that we find, we clean, we investigate it so we discover what it is, we do research into it, and our undergraduate and graduate students actually do reports and research so that we can learn more about campus,” she said.

Although it’s his first summer helping out with the excavation, anthropology and religious studies sophomore Josh Schnell said the program has been an important learning experience.

“What you can learn from them is awesome,” Schnell said. “They teach you how people lived, what they were using, and without it we really have a much lesser understanding of what went on in the past.”

In order to maintain its worldwide presence in the future, Goldstein said it’s important to understand as much about MSU’s past as possible.

“If MSU wants to be a world-class university, we have to be proud of how far it has come and where it is today,” she said. “You can’t do that if you don’t understand where it came from.”