As thousands of students leave campus each summer, Michigan State University enters its busiest season of construction, where campus archaeologists work to ensure the university’s history isn’t buried beneath its future.

In 2023, the Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) at MSU made a groundbreaking discovery: the foundation of the original, 145-year-old campus observatory that was demolished in the 1920s.

Now, the team is back at the excavation site hoping to uncover more information about the history of the building and the people who once utilized it.

Recent MSU graduate and current volunteer for CAP, Max Levinduski, was part of the program when they made the discovery. She recalled how exciting it was for the project to make national news and how it helped her figure out her path in archaeology.

“Today, we’re trying to figure out where a pipe went that we discovered in my unit two years ago,” Levinduski said. “So, it's kind of closure in a way, a little symbolic. As I'm finishing my time here at MSU, we're finishing out this site. And later on, we're going to do shovel tests to find a privy (outhouse) that I remember learning about when we started.”

Levinduski participated in the CAP 2024 undergraduate field school where they found much more of the building foundation, the original telescope podium foundation and a lead pipe that went through it.

MSU PhD student, Gabrielle Moran O’Dell is the campus archaeologist overseeing the project for this field season.

“We are out here this year trying to follow that pipeline to see if it leads to the (telescope) podium or where it goes to, to try and determine whether that pipe was put in during the construction of the observatory in 1880 or if it was put in after demolition or after that,” Moran-O’Dell said. “We do know that Will's House at one time here was the weather bureau, so it may be associated with that, or it may be associated with whatever technology was used for the telescope itself.”

The CAP was founded by Dr. Lynne Goldstien in 2005, becoming the world’s first university-run archaeology program.