You're driving toward the Watchung Reservation, stuck in traffic that snakes up Route 78, heading into a region of New Jersey not too far off the beaten track in Union County where the present fuses with the past.

The sign ahead reads "Cataract Hollow Road," the entrance to Feltville. You park your car in the gravel and step into a deserted village that once housed a 19th-century industrial utopia, which later became a middle-class resort. Today, Feltville/Glenside Park is the site of Montclair State University's Historical Archaeology Field School. The field school just celebrated its seventh year at the site, making it New Jersey's longest-running historical archaeological project.

"Feltville is the ideal environment with an ideal history," said Matthew Tomaso, acting director of the Center for Archaeological Studies. "Its accessibility, excellent state of preservation and geographic, social, and historical complexity provide exceptional training for all kinds of archaeological techniques. It also provides a representative look at the changing society in New Jersey."

Tomaso jokes that he's never been trapped inside a cobra-infested tomb, chased by a giant boulder or taken on invading forces to locate an artifact that would shift the balance of world power. His excursions are not glamorous overseas adventures, but a trek five miles past the Route 22 shopping strip where he spends a lot of time digging through privies.

Sponsored by Anthropology and the Center for Archaeological Studies, the field school offers low-cost, hands-on training and participation in research-oriented archaeological projects. Students receive an education in the basic skills of field archaeology in environments appropriate for both historic and prehistoric academic research sites. Students also receive six hours of college credit for completing the course, and several have had their first major publishing and presenting opportunities.

Carissa DeRooy, who completed her third season of fieldwork this summer, co-authored a paper with Tomaso that they recently presented at the Society for American Archaeology conference in Milwaukee.

"That was an exciting accomplishment for me, and I found the experience of being heard and noticed by the archaeological community thrilling," said DeRooy, an anthropology major/archaeology minor who graduated in August. She now works where she was an intern for two years--at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New York District, managing the Cultural Resources section of the Environmental Branch for project planning.

"At Feltville I learned how to ask and answer complex questions," she said. "Matt shares his theories with his students and asks specific questions, allowing them to answer on an intellectual level and through fieldwork. The field school was a stepping stone for opportunities that were available to me after only one season of fieldwork."

Tomaso said the field school allows students to do cutting-edge research. "We're teaching from the ground up, linking technique to methodology and theory," he explained. "Fieldwork is the final stage, the weeding out phase. It can change a potential archaeologist's outlook for better or worse."

For Anna Semon, a graduate student from the University of Chicago who came to the field school to learn more about cultural resource management (CRM) and New Jersey archaeology, the experience was an epiphany. "The field school proved to me that studying the past is something I love to do," she said. "I learned that the past is not set in stone. New information can change an interpretation or an understanding, and as archaeology evolves, new knowledge is obtained. Archaeology in a way reminds me of a jigsaw puzzle because the artifacts found need to fit into the bigger picture for people to fully understand and appreciate the past."

The field school, which was initiated by Stanley Walling of Classics and General Humanities, also offers up-to-date and high-tech training in some of the fastest-growing subfields of archaeology, including geoarchaeology, global positioning systems, total mapping stations, computer-based mapping and photography.

Walling said the field school is not just for those who want to become professional archaeologists. "It always has been both a research project and an intensive educational environment where students can learn about the subfields that make up modern archaeology," he said. "Since its inception, the field school has been designed to be a platform from which participants, who come to us with all sorts of backgrounds including the arts, physical sciences and social sciences, can direct themselves in a variety of educational and experiential directions.

"Archaeology often is conceived as a tool for studying the exotic and foreign," he continued. "It can be when the subject of study is a long-dead culture from the other side of the world but historical New Jersey archaeology, particularly of the type being practiced at Feltville, which focuses on our antecedents and traditions."

Blending documented proof with their findings, field school participants gather solid information about regional changes, which started them thinking of class and gender. By doing that they have been able to piece together daily experiences of individuals such as how they fed themselves and what they discarded.

The Feltville project involves questions concerning 19th-century industrialism, capitalism and political thought, and its connections to the making of modern American ideologies. "This is one of the best sites I've ever worked on," Tomaso said. "It produces dozens of complex problems for students, making it an unbeatable package for archaeological school.

"I get excited learning the truth about the past and verifying facts," he added. "I also love teaching people. So this is a profoundly satisfying life for me. But obtaining information from Feltville is secondary. Our primary focus is providing a high-quality, low-cost educational experience for our students."

Students can meet the archaeology faculty and learn more about the education in archaeology and its related fields at an open house on Thursday, Oct. 9, from 5 to 8 p.m. in Dickson Hall, Room 178. The event is sponsored by the Center for Archaeological Studies and the Department of Classics and General Humanities. For more information, call Tomaso at 973-655-7990.

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