
Dig into Archaeology!
Get hands-on experience at a real archaeology site! Summer 2024 was the 11th season for the Pine Lake Archaeological Field School, a collaborative effort of SUNY Oneonta and neighboring Hartwick College. SUNY Oneonta provides most of the equipment for the field school, which is held every other year at Hartwick’s Pine Lake Environmental Campus eight miles away from Oneonta, in West Davenport, NY.
The school offers an intense, hands-on experience that will give you valuable skills for employment and graduate school in archaeology and other fields. Working up to eight hours a day, you’ll learn basic methods in field archaeology, including survey and excavation techniques, mapping, and flotation and laboratory analysis.

Make a Discovery
You’ll explore different habitat zones – creek, forest upland, lake – in an area researchers believe was a gathering place for Native American people hundreds of years ago, before the transition from hunting and gathering to plant horticulture and agriculture.
Every season yields new discoveries. Sifting through excavated dirt, students have found 4,000-year-old cooking hearths, fire pits, nutting stones, projectile points (arrows) and other evidence of ancient hunter-gatherer communities. More than 10,000 specific, mapped locations for artifacts have been documented at the site since the school began.
Straight From Our Students
We’re going 5 centimeters at a time so that whatever we find, we can really detail it. I've gotten to get my hands dirty and touch everything. I love it!
Do I Have to Be an Anthropology Major?
You don’t have to be an anthropology major to participate in the field school, because you’ll learn skills that can be applied to all kinds of disciplines. Many field school alumni have been anthropology majors, but the program is open to all majors and often attracts students studying history, geoscience, biology, geography, chemistry and other fields.

Prepare for Your Career
Field school alumni say they learned valuable research and field work skills that prepared them for jobs after graduation. Within weeks of completing the field school, Georgiana Patterson ‘15 landed a two-month gig as an archaeological field technician for Landmark Archeology Inc. in the Albany, NY, area. From there, she worked for a year as an archaeologist in New Mexico.
Kasey Heiser ’13 completed the field school in 2011. He went on to earn a master’s degree in anthropology at Binghamton University and, like many other field school alumni, has worked in Cultural Resource Management (CRM) archaeology – required at historic sites to mitigate impact before construction can begin – ever since. He has returned to Pine Lake almost every year to serve as a field assistant.
Words to Inspire
The field school taught me so much, from how to work with others to the basics of what I needed to know for Cultural Resource Management.
Contact Dr. Renee B. Whitman
Contact the Anthropology Department
131 Physical Science Building
108 Ravine Parkway
Oneonta, NY 13820
United States