"From the looks of things, a lot of people were doing a lot of drinking," he says. "A lot of student were fined for drunken behavior."

The artifacts he has found in the Yard are not unusual or unexpected, Stubbs says, but the quantity of material has surprised him. In one nearby area, he filled 10 or 12 cardboard boxes per day.

"Every scoop that comes out has something in it," he says.

"IT SOUNDS sort of odd when you says, I'm digging up Harvard Yard," Stubbs says. But the Yard is, in many ways, a perfect excavation site. The area has been continuously occupied for more than 350 years, and is the only site in North American that has been preserved this well.

The hole for the water main runs alongside the former site of three of the University's earliest buildings all of which contained undergraduate lodgings.

According to records preserved by the Massachusetts Colonial Society, Massachusetts Hall, the oldest Harvard structure still standing and the second oldest college building in the nation, has always housed students. The Second Harvard College, where Harvard Hall now stands, also served as a dormitory after it was built in 1677. A third building, Stoughton College, once stood between the two buildings in front of What is now Johnston Gate.

When workers dug for water pipes in front of Matthews, Stubs says, he hoped of find the foundations of Indian college, a former Harvard building built in 1655.

Once built for the training of young Native Americans, Indian College later served as a publishing house before it was declared decrepit and razed. Its foundation never turned up.

Peabody professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology Stephen Williams, Stubbs' thesis advisor, oversees the Yard excavations.

Most Harvard historians, Williams says, tend to think "we who dig in the ground are some sort of weird antiquarians who love objects."

But archaeologists uncover information that isn't listed in history books or record books, Williams says.

"I have been here at Harvard a long time, and have tried to sensitize the community to the fact that there is information under the ground that tells about Harvard in the past," Williams says.

In 1926, President A. Lawrence Lowell first suggested that the Yard be excavated, Williams says. According to legend. Lowell looked out of the President's office--then in University Hall--and saw people digging a trench near where Widened Library still stands. They had found broken china that dated back to the early 1800s.

Lowell commissioned an artist to make copies of the china, which he sold to interested alumni, Williams says.

Archeologist here, eager to turn up Harvard's underground history, asked the administration to inform them of any utilities they planned to put in the ground.