  NGC 1980 is a young cluster that is located about 0.5 degrees south of the
Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC). Recent studies by Bouy et al. and Pillitteri et al.
have suggested that NGC 1980 contains an older population of stars compared to
a much younger ONC, and that it belongs to a foreground population that may be
located in front of the Orion A molecular gas by as much as 40 pc. In this work
we present low-resolution spectra towards 148 young stars found towards the NGC
1980 region. We determine the spectral types of these stars, examine accretion
signatures and measure the extinction towards them. We determine that based on
these observations, the age of the population of NGC 1980 is indistinguishable
from L1641, estimated to be ~3 Myr, comparable with the study by Fang et al.
