Jessica Buckley (CAS’25) cleaning off an uncovered floor at the platform site at the El Campanario Archaeological Project in Peru. Photo courtesy of Jessica Buckley

Archaeology

BU Student Archaeologists Headed to Peru and Hungary This Summer

Digging at settlements thousands of years old, CAS students detail their finds of pottery, building foundations, even human remains

Summer is a chance for archaeology students to get their hands dirty and volunteer for a dig.

These stories from two BU College of Arts & Sciences students reveal the depths they explored this summer, literally and figuratively, by digging into the history of foreign lands. Archaeology students are required to do field or laboratory research as part of their coursework. This summer, Jessica Buckley (CAS’25) visited coastal Peru to participate in the El Campanario Archaeological Project. Oliver Goss (CAS’26) traveled to Hungary to assist with the Szazhalombatta Field Project.

Here’s how their journeys went. 

El Campanario Archaeological Project in central coastal Peru

Buckley attended a field school on the coast of Peru this past summer, working on the El Campanario Archaeological Project, run by Jose Peña, a staff archaeologist at global archaeology consultancy firm Chronicle Heritage, who recently completed his dissertation on the site. 

This field site, started in 2015, studies the sociopolitical organization of the El Campanario settlement during the Late Intermediate Period (1000 to 1400 A.D.).

According to its website, the site contains human remains and artifacts, and archaeologists knew from previous research that the site’s inhabitants made pottery, textiles, maize beer, and more. 

Buckley found the field school through the Archaeological Institute of America website, which posts field school positions. She was excited about the chance to explore Andean archaeology—the area of Peru and Ecuador along the Andes mountains—after taking a class on the subject during sophomore year. 

“I thought that I would take the opportunity to go abroad for half the summer and see what Peru would be like,” says Buckley, who is double majoring in archaeology and sociocultural anthropology.

The team lived in the town of Huarmey, about a 20-minute drive from the site. The pace of the work was challenging, she recalls, because the group would leave for the site at 7 am, dig for about seven hours, and then work in the lab for another hour. 

They excavated carefully and bagged and tagged everything they found. The artifacts they unearthed included remains of walls, floors, and more. 

“The last week we spent in the lab, weighing all of the samples and recording everything,” she says. “We then boxed it all up and organized it for storage in a museum under the Ministry of Culture of Peru.” 

This trip was the first time Buckley had lived on her own in a foreign country for an extended period, and she struggled, she says, since she isn’t a fluent Spanish speaker. 

Once the team finished work for the day, they would have an hour to relax, followed by a quick dinner, and then be ready for an early bedtime. “But I never felt like I was overwhelmed by the challenges presented,” she says. 

Buckley’s favorite part of the experience was exploring places with her new friends in what she describes as “a unique situation.” 

Szazhalombatta Field Project in Hungary

Oliver Goss, who is majoring in archaeology with a minor in visual studies, was one of about 20 students working for the Szazhalombatta Field Project. The site is a 5,000-year-old Bronze Age settlement along the Danube River in a small town in Hungary. 

Finds from the site include pottery, plaster, bone tools, lithics, animal and human bones, and more. The excavation at the site is led by Magdolna Vicze, a researcher at the Hungarian National Museum, and three other professors, from Cambridge, Southampton, and Vienna Universities. 

Goss says the most exciting part of the summer was the team’s discovery of a fully intact human skeleton, something that’s “completely unheard of for this site.” The find inspired Goss to take human osteology, the science of studying the human skeleton, this semester back at BU. 

This site was first occupied at the end of the Early Bronze Age and then through the Middle Bronze Age Period, the website says. It was again occupied in the Late Bronze Age. 

“Half of my family is Hungarian, so this was also a way of kind of coming to this country and making my own kind of connection with it,” Goss says, adding that they had traveled to the country a few times, but usually just the capital city of Budapest. 

This was the first time Goss had stayed in the countryside, and they describe it as an immersive experience in Hungarian culture and a day-to-day life that they were unfamiliar with.

For Goss, the biggest challenge was dealing with the day-to-day nitty-gritty activities of the dig site. “I did not imagine that archaeology would just be so much manual labor,” they say.

One stressful component involved always ensuring that the cataloging documents were kept away from the tent’s windows in case of unexpected rain, and also making sure that a tarp would be ready at a moment’s notice.

“It was really interesting to experience [these activities] firsthand,” Goss says, “after having done so much archaeology that was just like reading papers and looking at microscopes.”