ENFIELD — As her professor watched, Cornell University senior Johnamarie Macias dug through the trash heap of a hotel Saturday, looking for bones and broken plates.

The Enfield Falls Hotel and its trash heap were long ago buried under more than a foot of topsoil — and Macias and her 15 classmates are now excavating the remains of the building and the hamlet that once surrounded it in what is now Robert H. Treman State Park.

Macias, pulling a fragment of chicken bone from a plastic bag, told visitors from the community about the archeological treasures they've unearthed from the garbage of the hotel's outdoor kitchen: nails, ceramics, bones, coal, charcoal, safety pins, even a metallic broach.

“It's more solid,” she said.

In the early 20th century, Robert H. Treman bought all the property in the Village of Enfield Falls, then he donated 387 acres to the state for the creation of a park, preserving the gorges and natural beauty of the area. Except for a couple structures, including the grist mill, the buildings were demolished by the 1920s to create the park.

Since 1998, Sherene Baugher, an associate professor and the director of the archeology program at Cornell, has taken students to the park to continue the archeological project as part of a class called Fieldwork in Urban Archeology. In the past few years she has invited the public to learn about the area's rich history and to see how the process works.

“A lot of our parks were active communities that were demolished,” she said. “These are not untouched landscapes. In bringing back this history of a whole village that was here, it helps people going to our parks to realize that a lot of the landscape in the United States has a deep history. Archeology is not just in Egypt.”

In seven years of digging — for two years no excavating was done — the students have uncovered the village's general store, the blacksmith's home, which doubled as a post office, the home of one of the hotel's owners and the hotel, in addition to smaller outbuildings and trash heaps, such as the one Macias as was digging in.

Baugher and her students have set up exhibits inside the refurbished grist mill museum that detail the work they've done so far and what they've learned about the vanished village. The project has been so successful, she said, because it teaches students basic fieldwork techniques while also performing a service to the community.

While most visitors to the site are local parents, children and sometimes even the descendants of the original inhabitants of Enfield Falls, on Saturday a couple visiting Ithaca from Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., stopped by the dig site.

“It's very interesting,” said Bob Harrington, standing with his wife, Pam. “We've been watching, and the students have all been very informative.”

Park staff and the Friends of Robert H. Treman State Park invited Baugher, who was New York City's first archeologist and directed the excavation of American Indian villages near Tutelo Park in the Town of Ithaca, to investigate claims of a buried village.

“The staff at (the park) knew there was a village, and they wanted to know if anything was still buried,” she said. “What we're trying to do here is make people aware that there is a very rich heritage in Ithaca.”

Rain has sometimes hindered their progress, but generally, no one has disturbed the site. At night they put plywood over the dig site to keep it secure.

“Here no one's really disturbed anything. Everyone's really interested in local history,” Macias said. “That's not always the case.”