MONTEZUMA -- There it was: the rusted iron skeleton of a wheel once sturdy enough to haul cargo, an 18-inch diameter piece of history poking up through the earth.

Excavators did not dare give it an unearthing yank -- the thin bars of iron could crumble if not handled with care. So they brushed dirt, bits of shale and earthworms aside with their flat trowels, layer by layer, fearful of ruining their hours of work.

The site was Clinton's Ditch, Lock 62 on the Erie Canal. The goal was to excavate the plot of vegetation and soil alongside the canal, where a lock tender worked and lived.

The Montezuma Historical Society set out in August to uncover what they could about life along the canal by convening an archaeological dig. After uncovering an assortment of pottery pieces, warped nails, a horseshoe and other remnants of a past life, the volunteer team was closing up the three meter-square plots Saturday -- but not before resurrecting that wheel.

"I think it's neat," said Bunny Baker, of Montezuma, as she sifted a pile of dirt, picking out orange bits of pottery and slivers of glass. Nearby, a pile of brown lunch bags were filled with the same bits and pieces of history -- chunks of mortar, rusted nails and a mud-caked horseshoe that may have belonged to a mule.

"To think it's right in our own back yard," she said.

A short walk into the woods off Chapman Street in Montezuma leads to a clearing where men once worked around the clock to help boats pass through a particularly shallow area the Seneca River.

At Clinton's Ditch, cargo was unloaded from the boats to make them lighter and able to pass through the shallow section of the river. Cargo was transported by wagon -- the still half-buried wheel may have belonged to one -- to the other side, where it was reloaded.

One of the canal's original locks, Clinton's Ditch was used until an aqueduct was built in 1856, said Michael Riley, a board member of the Canal Society of New York State and Mentz historian. The lock has been abandoned since, slowly being buried under a century and a half of dirt, until now.

"It brings the people into it," Riley said. "It's the human factor -- who was living here what they were doing."

Secluded from the town, the lock tender lived in a home near the water, to be able to meet the boats as they arrived. Saturday, the volunteer team of excavators, led by archaeologist in the making David Babson, dug in test plots near what historians believe was either a work post or a canal shop.

Of course, it is impossible to be completely certain what the sunken square outline of rocks used to be, said Babson, a graduate student of historical archaeology at Syracuse University. "We're always making an educated guess," he said.

But a work site or canal shop is a good guess, based on the items the team had uncovered in the past month -- mostly utilitarian items, rather than the china and home goods that would be found at a former residence, he said.

Babson watched as volunteers scraped dirt away from wheel embedded in the ground, just a few inches from the surface. They followed his instructions to slide their trowels beneath the wheel to loosen the bottom edge and to dislodge the earth packed in between the spokes, apparently stable but undoubtedly delicate, he said.

When a trowel's touch jostled the wheel, the group that had gathered around it stood back and waited with bated breath as Babson lifted it from its shallow grave, intact -- history unearthed.