KIDS EXCAVATE OLD COINS FROM A CLASSROOM CLOSET

Bobby Scotto, a fourth grader at the Children’s Workshop School on 12th Street in the East Village, wants to be an archaeologist when he grows up, and he is already off to a good start. In the past few months he has excavated dozens of old coins, a toy watch and other artifacts, all from an unlikely dig site: his classroom’s closet.

Bobby, an earnest 10-year-old with a mop of dark hair and saucerlike brown eyes, was bitten by the archaeology bug four or five months ago, when his class read a book about a migrant farmworker who found old coins in a field. Bobby decided he wanted to collect old coins of his own, and he had noticed a small gap between the floorboards in the closet. So he reached into that gap as far as he could and, voilà, out came a bunch of wheat pennies (minted from 1909 to 1958), a buffalo nickel and other treasures.

Bobby and his best friend in the class, Lizardo Lozada, soon began reaching farther underneath the floorboards with the help of simple tools — pencils, scissors, untwisted coat hangers. “At first the other kids were like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Bobby said one recent afternoon while demonstrating his technique. “But then they saw we were finding old, cool stuff, so they started doing it and finding cool stuff, too.”

And so began an improbable exercise in hands-on archaeology that soon attracted all 21 students in the class. “There’s something about the degree of difficulty that’s just perfect,” said the class’s teacher, Miriam Sicherman, 43, who has been teaching at the school for 15 years. “You can’t just reach in and grab something, but it is possible to get something. There’s just enough gratification.”

Along the way, the students have also become adept at research (when they find something, they try to learn more about it on the web); cataloging (each object is logged on a sheet that Ms. Sicherman helped the students design); preservation (the artifacts are kept in plastic bags); and documentation (Ms. Sicherman posts photos of the artifacts on an Instagram account). And as their excavations began to yield diminishing returns, they sought out new dig sites, receiving permission to explore closets in adjacent classrooms.

Ms. Sicherman has arranged for a professional archaeologist to visit the class, and there are plans for the artifacts to be displayed in some sort of exhibition, perhaps in the school’s library. The principal, Maria Velez-Clarke, said she had considered enlisting the custodial staff to remove some of the closet floorboards, which would provide easier access to whatever is still beneath them.

Not everyone likes that idea. “That might be a little too easy,” Bobby said. “We’d find something every five seconds.” Other students expressed similar reservations. The thrill of the hunt is apparently a big part of the project’s appeal.

That is not to say that Bobby is opposed to taking the hunt to the next level. He has asked his uncle, Robert Silver, for a metal detector. “But I told him it’s very expensive,” Mr. Silver said, “so he’ll have to wait until Christmas.”

Dennis adds:

To read the complete article, see:
Young Treasure Hunters Dig Up History Lessons in a Classroom’s Closet (www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/nyregion/young-treasure-hunters-dig-up-history-lessons-in-a-classrooms-closet.html)

To read the Instagram feed, see:
closetarchaeology (https://instagram.com/closetarchaeology/)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web