Others wanted a touch of the real thing.

Sprung for the semester, members of the Upper Perkiomen High School archaeology club headed to Valley Forge National Historical Park, picked up shovels and trowels, and started digging, carefully.

Just 35 feet from the steps of the George Washington Memorial Chapel off Route 23, the students sifted through the dirt at what is thought to have been the campsite of Col. James Varnum's First Regiment of Rhode Island for evidence of their six-month stay during the Continental Army's legendary winter encampment in 1777-78.

"Picking up a musket ball and knowing that you're the first person since the Revolutionary War to hold it, that's really cool to me," said club vice president Katherine Dale, 15, of Barto.

Try that for realistic gameplay.

Under the guidance of social studies teacher and club founder Louis Farrell, as many as seven students from the Montgomery County high school worked side-by-side with Temple University archaeologists, who arranged the dig from June 16 through this week.

"I want to teach them basic excavation, documentation," said Farrell, of Hatfield. "But I also want to teach them to appreciate history and appreciate their own history."

Yellow string delineated the rectangular areas they had dug and sat in as they carefully scooped dirt with small shovels, dumped it into buckets and hand-sifted it for artifacts.

If one was found, it would be placed in a small, marked locking plastic bag to be taken to Temple's lab.

The students also had help from Bravo, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that specializes in battlefield archaeology. On weekends, a team of volunteers scanned the site with metal detectors and other technology, marked the locations of discovered artifacts with tiny pink flags, and then plotted them onto maps. This allowed the diggers to concentrate on certain areas, Farrell said, and gave them a fuller picture of the land and its former occupants.

It was quite the experience for Upper Perkiomen junior Andrew Leffel, 16, who has aspired to be an archaeologist since he first saw Indiana Jones and his famous fedora when he was 6. The Valley Forge excavation, he said, taught him that, Harrison Ford to the contrary, archaeologists have "a lot of paperwork."

Leffel and Dale, who wants to minor in archaeology in college, were founding members of the club, which started in October and originally drew about 25 students. Four "regulars," Farrell said, have worked at the site consistently.

As preparation, he required the students to attend training sessions at the Marcus Hook Plank House, a late 17th-century home once inhabited by Blackbeard's mistress.

In their quest for clues to camp life at Valley Forge, they discovered a neatly laid-out hearth, likely used as a camp kitchen, near the site's entrance, and a patch of light red soil, indicating that a fire had burned there. How the site was oriented was still in question.

If the excavation site was the backside of Varnum's base, Farrell said, that means the students were working on the campsite of the only black soldiers in the Continental Army.

The diggers found as many as 100 unfired lead musket balls and two U.S.A. buttons inscribed "1777." They also unearthed some musket balls that had been hammered down into game pieces and dice, which would have bucked Washington's no-gambling policy.

The students came across liquor bottles and chards of pottery - indicating a much later centennial celebration at the chapel that might have spilled into the woods.

All of the finds by the students and Temple archaeologists have gone to the chapel, with the most interesting artifacts, like the game pieces and the rare buttons, displayed in a glass case in the chapel.

"It's a very mutually beneficial situation," said Carrin Bloom, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Temple who oversaw the dig and worked on a site about 50 feet away last summer. "They get the experience not many high schoolers get. . . and I get the benefit of getting that data out of the ground."

Many questions remain about Varnum's campsite. To some of the students, that was the best part of the game.

"I really like the process of interpretation about [archaeology]," said Farrell's son, Jack, 17, who also worked on the site. "History isn't as solid a thing as we might have been told it is."