For the past five years, Lehigh University Archaeology Professor David Small, has been working with teams of students and Emmaus volunteers on excavations at the 1803 House to understand the buried walls behind the kitchen. Lehigh's enterprise was not the first however, as Ryan Loughren, a teacher at Seven Generations Charter School, took several students to dig south of the kitchen. Excavation has uncovered what was the original foundation walls to the building and a small interior chamber. By peeling away the soil they were able to reconstruct various uses of the area. Analysis of the artifacts found, shows that the material dates within a 50-year range year 1800. In 2017, the project took on an exciting new focus. Lehigh University will be constructing an integrated, interactive website which will contain not only the information from the excavation, but the information from the 1803 House itself. This new focus is only possible through the Mellon Digital Initiative Grant, which Lehigh University helped the 1803 House procure. That same year the excavating crew uncovered a "privy". In 2019, the team completed their excavation of the site. To preserve it, they first laid protective material over the walls and then placed clean fill over the areas covered. Now, the 1803 House anxiously awaits the release of the new website being created by Lehigh University students View Dig Progress; 2019 Privy Project; 2019 East Penn Press Article; For all published articles Go to Resources.
