It was love at first sight for Lisa Cordani-Stevenson, when she first set foot in Long Island's Southold Indian Museum.

"I didn't want to leave," she says.

These days, Cordani-Stevenson, AS '95, spends a lot of time there as the only paid staff member. "I don't really have a title," she says, "but I use museum assistant, because that covers everything."

As a child, she was interested in anthropology, in particular, Indian culture.

An anthropology major at Delaware, Cordani-Stevenson worked after graduation as a field assistant at archaeological sites in Alaska and New York state, before enrolling in the master's program in anthropology at Hunter College in New York City. Research for her thesis, "Historical Archaeology of Long Island's North Fork"--with\ a focus on an Indian fort called Corchaug--led her to the museum.

About 90 percent of the museum's 10,000 artifacts are related to the Algonkians, the name for the language spoken by the native people who once dominated Long Island.

Once numbering several thousand, the Algonkians were agricultural people, Cordani-Stevenson says. "They grew corn, beans and squash, the 'three sisters.' When eaten together, corn, beans and squash provided all the nutrients they needed to live."

The Algonkians lived in small villages composed of wigwams, which were built from animal hides or woven reeds stretched over sapling wood, Cordani-Sevenson says. They also had a rich fishing tradition, and built sophisticated dugout canoes, the largest of which could hold 80 people.

When English settlers from Connecticut crossed the Long Island Sound and established a presence on Long Island in the 1600s, they immediately coveted the Algonkians' fertile lands, she says.

"That's why the English chose this area.The Indians had already done all the work. The land had been cleared."

By the late 1700s, diseases such as smallpox, introduced by the white settlers to a population that lacked immunity, as well as the pressure from the growing settlements, had decimated the Algonkians.

But, remnants of their presence remain.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, potato farmers in the Southold, N.Y., area as they worked their fields, were continually turning up arrowheads and other artifacts, including pots or fragments of pots made from clay or steatite (soapstone).

"Farmers are still plowing them up," Cordani-Stevenson says.

"In the 1920s, farmers didn't know what to do with the stuff. They stored it in barns and invited people to look at it," she says. The Long Island chapter of the New York State Archaeological Association was organized in 1925, and, after a farmer's estate set aside money to build a museum, a modest structure was built in Southold in 1962 to serve as the chapter's home.

Despite having "the largest collection of clay pottery anywhere," Cordani-Stevenson says, the museum traditionally has had a low profile. She was unaware of its existence until she began researching her thesis. "People down the block don't know the museum's here," she says.

That may be changing, as Cordani-Stevenson has written a hands-on archaeology curriculum for students, from the first to the sixth grades. This summer program, in which the students conduct a dig on the museum property, just completed its second year.

"First, I give them an introduction to archaeology and explain why we dig and publish our results," Cordani-Stevenson says. "The students have found quartz chips left over from tool making and fire-cracked rocks."

Although she is a part-time employee, Cordani-Stevenson oversees the collection and the research library, which includes material owned by the state of New York. She also gives tours and supervises the gift shop. This fall, in addition, she began teaching physical and cultural anthropology at nearby Suffolk Community College.

She says she hopes to expand the museum. Her work is definitely a labor of love, she says, especially the opportunity to correct popular misconceptions about the Algonkians.