The St. James AME Zion Church Community Excavations
Beginning in 2021, CIAMS faculty, in collaboration with Gerard Aching (Cornell Africana) and Reverend Terrance King (St. James AME Zion Church), launched a new community engaged initiative to explore the history of the St. James community. The St. James AME Zion church building was constructed during the late 1830s and is today the oldest AME Zion church in the world still in active use. The building is known to have been the most important Underground Railroad station in Ithaca during the 1840s and 1850s. Harriett Tubman is known to have spent time at the Church and Frederick Douglass also visited.
We conducted excavations over the course of four fall field seasons, from 2021-2024. In each season, our excavation team included community members and Cornell students and faculty. Our goal has been to use archaeology as a means to help the Church and wider community tell empowering stories of St. James's past. We hope to inspire all participants to learn more about their community and its rich history.
Our fourth and final season of community excavations concluded in the fall of 2024. The work of artifact processing, cataloguing, and analysis is still ongoing.
On June 19, 2025, we opened a new exhibit on the archaeology of St. James at The History Center of Tompkins County. The exhibit will be on display in the atrium gallery until December 31, 2025.
We encourage you to take the CyArk tour of the church and watch the video below created by Historic Ithaca:
Cornell student Ruth Rajcoomar '24 discusses the need for a more inclusive and equitable field and how the community excavations at St. James highlight the potential for financially inclusive fieldwork experiences.
Local community members and Cornell Professor Lori Khatchadourian working together to collect artifacts from the screen.
Carol Anne Barsody
CIAMS M.A. student Carol Anne Barsody shares her experiences participating in the excavations at St. James.
SMSA students participating in excavations at St. James AME Zion Church in Fall 2021.
(Photo courtesy of the Science and Mathematics Academy Saturday STEM Program.)
As part of Saturday’s festival on June 15th, Cornell’s Institute for Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS) and St. James AME Zion Church organized an artifact washing activity for kids next to the church.
Figure 1. The test unit; a one-meter by one-meter square.
MyKayla Williamson
A multidisciplinary team of Cornell students and faculty and local schoolchildren began an archeological dig Sept. 18 at St. James AME Zion church in Ithaca.
Church members and a multidisciplinary team of Cornell faculty and students are learning more about St. James A.M.E. Zion Church by doing an archaeological dig.
During the fall of 2021, sixteen Cornell graduate and undergraduate students took part in the St James AME Zion Community Excavations alongside Cornell faculty and middle and high school community members. The student participants included CIAMS graduate student members and Archaeology undergraduates as well as participants from other majors and...
