K-State and KU continued their collaboration for the summer Kansas Archaeological Field School (KAFS) through the 1990s. Dr. Brad Logan assumed leadership of the KAFS and trained students from both institutions while also involving them with research and service through archaeological projects in northeastern and north-central Kansas.
The 1991 Kansas Archaeological Field School was held at Fort Leavenworth in northeastern Kansas. Over six weeks, K-State and KU students gained archaeological field training at a site predating this historic post by more than one thousand years! They learned about standard and new techniques used to investigate and document archaeological remains in the field. This project resulted in collecting information about when and how Native peoples lived at what we now call the Quarry Creek Site (1991) between about 1 and 750 CE.
In addition to the summer Kansas Archaeological Field School, Dr. O'Brien continued to teach the Archaeological Field and Laboratory Methods course on Saturdays during the Fall semester. Students received training and investigated sites more local to Manhattan and, in one case, directly associated with the history of K-State. This continued to be done at former living sites of ancestral Native Americans, but also at historic Euro-American sites.
The first of the latter projects (1990) was carried out at the Moffett-O'Neill house site, now within the Konza Prairie Biological Station preserve. The following year K-State students completed limited archaeological investigations alongside the foundation of the historic barn at the Isaac Goodnow House State Historic Site. This was conducted as a service to the Kansas Historical Society, which owns the property on which the Goodnow house and barn sits.
Dr. O'Brien's final Fall field methods course in 1997 focused on the contemporaneous site of Bluemont Central College. Isaac Goodnow and other early Euro-American settlers established this educational institution in the 1850s not long after they settled what is now Manhattan, Kansas. This eventually developed into Kansas State University.
Acknowledgments
