Digging into the past: Brandeis students excavate medieval Scotland
Photo Credit: Darlene Brooks Hedstrom
By David Levin
May 27, 2026
The summer before her junior year, Natalie Greenfield ’26 found herself in an unexpected place: elbows-deep in Scottish soil, meticulously combing through a pit of clay and rubble.
Under the guidance of Brandeis researcher Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, Greenfield and five other undergraduates set out to excavate the ruins of the 12th-century Lindores Abbey — a historic site perched on the edge of a Scottish estuary, its stone walls still guarding a few eyebrow-raising secrets. Among them: evidence that monks were distilling spirits here as early as the 1490s, making it one of the earliest known distilleries in Scotland.
For most of the students, it was their first time doing fieldwork. By the end of the summer, they had become seasoned members of a research team working alongside professional archaeologists. The experience inspired Greenfield so deeply that she returned to Lindores the following year as an intern — where she ended up running a paleography seminar and an experimental archaeology lab where students made ink using medieval ingredients and methods.
"We train our students and we trust them," says Brooks Hedstrom, an Associate Professor with joint appointments in Classical, Christian, and Near Eastern/Judaic Studies. "In their first few weeks in the field, they’re often astonished that they get to really do the work. They're not limited to a few mundane tasks. They're fully participating."
That participation, Brooks Hedstrom says, builds skills that travel far beyond the dig site. Most of her students won't become archaeologists. Rather, they'll take what they learned — meticulous documentation, systematic analysis, the ability to work collaboratively under pressure — into entirely different fields. "The skill set you learn in archaeology can be applied to almost any project," she says. "It's an important service for me to be able to pass that on."
Greenfield, a Medieval and Renaissance Studies major, is a case in point: she’s heading to Oxford University in the fall for graduate study. She says that the dig didn't just expand her résumé — it changed how she moves through the world. "Wherever I go, I look at the spaces around me in a way I never would have before," she says. "I have a greater appreciation for their history, and the fact that they can be so transformed by the people that inhabit them."
Although the dig taught her to decipher medieval texts and conduct experimental archaeology, she says, its deepest lesson was harder to name. "It taught me how to learn," she says. "That's not a small thing."
