LOWELL -- As six UMass Lowell students and two Queens University archaeologists began digging in front of St. Patrick's Church, looking for artifacts that might have belonged to the city's first Irish immigrants, some team members prayed they wouldn't come up empty.
The Rev. James Taggart, St. Patrick pastor, who OK'd the dig, prayed they'd find something, too.
So when the researchers unearthed a partial set of approximately 150-year-old Irish rosary beads soon after breaking ground Monday, Taggart viewed it as a divinely fitting answer to their prayers.
"Yes, it was quite an inspiring find," Taggart said. "The exciting thing about this dig overall is that it reminds us of our immigrant roots. And in particular, the Irish people that our first wooden church on this site was originally built to serve."
According to UMass Lowell academic director Frank Talty, who coordinated the excavation project, the church lawn was chosen for the dig based on research that showed it had not been built on for more than a century, since it was last occupied by a large settlement of Irish immigrants.
The settlement, which was referred to as "New Dublin" in an 1831 article in the Portsmouth Journal, consisted of 100 cabins that stood 7 to 10 feet high, made of slabs and rough boards. There was also a schoolhouse for about 150 children, the Journal reported.
By yesterday afternoon, the UMass Lowell students, under the supervision of Queens University Belfast archaeologists Colm Donnelly and Harry Welsh, had used medium-sized spades and small, pointed trowels to carefully excavate a pair of 6-foot-by-6-foot square holes, each about 3 feet deep, on either side of the footpath leading from Suffolk Street to the doors of St. Patrick, in the Acre section of the city.
Donnelly took a break from digging to show several artifacts that the group had placed in plastic bags, including the rosary beads, a clay pipe, buttons and shards of decorated pottery.
"We use the side of the trowel more than the pointed tip," Welsh said. "When done correctly, it's like peeling back the pages of time, one level of soil at a time."
The UMass Lowell students, who didn't hesitate to get their hands dirty in the trenches yesterday, included Dimitrios Booras, an undergraduate English major from Lowell; Jonathan Brown, a work-environment graduate student from Dracut; Eunice Delice, an undergraduate political-science major from Methuen; Alaina Puleo, a biology graduate student from Tyngsboro; Kimberly Scarfo, an undergraduate history major from Chelmsford; and Amanda Veiga, a regional economic and social-development graduate student from Lowell, who also teaches an ancient-civilizations class to seventh-graders in Peabody.
An interesting thing that Veiga learned from taking part in her first archaeological dig was that "there were a lot more artifacts closer to the surface than I would have imagined," she said.
As part of the project, Welsh and Donnelly showed the students how to use a surveyor's instrument to record the precise soil-depths at which each artifact was uncovered.
"We learned that for every decade that passes, the soil level rises by about a centimeter," Veiga said.
When Booras first fingered a shirt button while sifting through the dirt, he initially mistook it for an old coin, he admitted.
"It's fun to take a look back, through this dig, and see a bit of what Lowell was like back in the 19th century," Booras said. "It's important to know about our history."
A major difference between conducting an archaeological dig in Northern Ireland and in Lowell in August, a red-faced Donnelly noted, was the extreme summer heat.
"It's so hot. We're not used to this, I have to say," Donnelly said. "We're used to rain and wind."
Donnelly indicated, though, that he would accept a return invitation to Lowell to supervise similar future projects.
UMass Lowell and Queens University officials have already had discussions about having students explore other potential immigrant-artifact hotspots in the city, said Talty, "possibly as an annual joint project for the next three to five summers."
Other collaborative excavation sites could be located elsewhere on St. Patrick's grounds, or beneath the pavement closer to Market Street, Talty said.
UMass Lowell Chancellor Marty Meehan said the archaeological dig is part of the college's effort to provide students with a greater global perspective that will contribute to their career success.
"Deepening a student's understanding of multiple cultures, in today's shrinking world, is no longer optional but required," Meehan said.
To further that global-thinking philosophy, Meehan noted that the university has established nine international centers, in Africa, Asia, France, Greece, Turkey, Ireland and in Latin and South America, and in the Middle East.