Local Scouts join YSU archeology fieldwork course

BOARDMAN

On the site of a long-defunct horse-racing track, a 13-year-old boy began his Saturday by pushing around a $20,000 piece of equipment.

Despite his lack of training – and that the ground-penetrating radar he was guiding was almost taller than he was – the Boy Scout wasn’t at risk of damaging the technology.

Matt O’Mansky, Youngs-town State University associate professor and chairman of sociology, anthropology and gerontology, walked alongside the Scout and described how the machine worked.

That was the clean part of the morning. Later, the boys from Boy Scout Troop 46 joined YSU archaeology students down in the dirt while attempting to earn their archaeology merit badges.

The joint learning experience was part of O’Mansky’s four-week summer archaeological fieldwork course.

This year’s iteration of the course centered on the Southern Park Stables near Washington Boulevard and Tod Avenue.

While most of the college students dug test pits – a square hole used as a gauge for determining the likelihood of artifacts in a particular area – a pair of student volunteers joined Tom Delvaux, a YSU adjunct archaeology instructor, to help instruct the Scouts in digging pits of their own.

The Boy Scouts’ archaeological excursion isn’t just an interesting way to pass a summer day, at least not in the mind of the troop’s leader, Rick Wolf.

Read more about what they were doing in Wednesday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.