Revealing history together/Three part timeteam

In 2017 The Museum of Skanderborg in Denmark invited everybody who had an interest, to take part in an excavation during the annual autumn school break. The object of excavation was a poorhouse from the end of the 19th century. An obvious case for the historical archive, which is already a part of the museum. As the historians plowed the papers, the archaeologists begun to lay bare the actual ruins of the farm.
As we compared the preliminary results not much made sense. The photographs that was supposed to show the farm, had very little to do with the structure that revealed itself from the soil. It was a huge eye-opener, that something as young as 100 years could be this challenging to decipher! Poorhouses were a dark mark of the society of the 20th century, and they were rapidly closed, ruined and forgotten. Without almost no records about daily life, interior or personal belongings, we know very little of these institutions.
Without applying the archaeological method on this object, we would still be counting on the faulty photograph. We wouldn’t have any idea about the interior or the objects used here. Without the historians, we would never have figured this to be a poorhouse! We wouldn’t have known the timeframe of use, and we wouldn’t know the people who inhabited those ruins. Without the workforce of the volunteers we never could have excavated the structure at all. Not only did they represent a surprisingly efficient workforce, they also had as much knowledge as the rest of us when it came to a 100 year old farm. The elder visitors helped identifying multiple structures and objects remembering their grandparents farms, and we all had a notion of revealing history together!