Digging into local history

TOWN OF MANLIUS – Despite a week featuring heavy rains, a smiling and muddy group of about 20 middle-school aged students wrapped up the town of Manlius’ annual archeology camp last Friday.
The program is a collaborative effort between the town of Manlius recreation department and the school district.
It is facilitated by Fayetteville-Manlius history teacher Todd Sorensen and retired teacher Diana Green.
The dig site is at the southern end of a large parcel the district owns on Broadfield Road that once was home to an Onondaga village in the mid-1400s.
Last week, the students found two arrowheads and some shards of pottery, as well as evidence of cooking site, including a squash seed that had been preserved in charcoal.
The items will be added to the high school’s collection of Native American artifacts that have come from the Broadfield Road site.
Since the late 1990s, the F-M school district has offered the archeology program, which includes the archeology camp, the archeology club during the school year, and is interwoven into the curriculum of the anthropology class at F-M High School.
It is the only program of its type in New York.
Tony Gonyea, a Faith Keeper with the Onondaga Nation, stopped by the site on Friday to discuss the Nation’s efforts to preserve archeologically important sites, like the site on Broadfield Road.
He also shared with the students that many artifacts that had been stripped from burial sites and put in museums and personal collections are now being “repatriated” to Native American tribes.
Gonyea also gave the students a hands-on demonstration of how his ancestors made rope using the fibers from local vegetation.