Dirty Hands in Foreign Lands

There's one thing that Curtis N. Sandburg digs more than anything else. He loves it so much that he's done it in Los Angeles, Turkey, Israel and Italy. He first did it when he was 15, and he says he'll keep doing it for as long as he can.

Curt Sandburg digs digging.

But this archaeology grad student isn't your average Indiana Jones. He's tall and thin, wears glasses, and looks like he'd be more at home in a library than in a pit full of poisonous snakes. He seems perfectly comfortable in a tie and suspenders, and it's hard to imagine him in boots and bush hat, carrying a whip.

But then of course, no one intelligent would feel comfortable in a pit full of poisonous snakes. And Curt Sandburg is more of a bona fide archeaologist than Harrison Ford ever could be.

A fourth-year graduate student, Sandburg has always loved excavation. He says museums and archaeological artifacts have fascinated him ever since he was a little boy. By the time he was a teenager, his parents wanted to see just how deep-felt this interest was. "My parents were saying 'Enough of this archaeology stuff. Send him out and see if he likes getting his hands dirty.' "

So at age 14 he tried to take part in a University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) dig, but insurance regulations prohibited anyone under 15 from participating. "I cried and screamed as my mother dragged me away," Sandburg recalls. So the next year he was back, eager to get his hands dirty.

In Los Angeles County in 1971, he helped excavate a UCLA Middle Horizon Indian site which dated back to 2000 B.C. But instead of getting his love for archaeology out of his system, the hands-on experience only fueled his passion.

"Everyone loves mummies and dinosaurs when they're little, but most people grow out of it. I never did," laughs the 30-year-old grad student. While his thoughts about archaeology have changed in the past 15 years, his enthusiasm for the field has not waned. "We're getting, in many ways, beyond ourselves technologically. We need fields like archaeology and history that have some semblance of retrospect, some sense of perspective. I really do believe that we can learn from our mistakes."

"It's necessary for archaeology to do a good job of reconstructing culture," Sandburg says. And for Sandburg archaeology is far more than big holes and little artifacts. "Dead archaeology is the driest dust that blows," Sandburg says, quoting Mortimer Weiler, one of his favorite writers. "The best archaelogists make things stand up, make them come to life," he explains. "You have to use as many sources as you can and you try to come up with a three-dimensional version of what really went on. It's like making a pop-up picture."

For example, in a big project Sandburg's working on in northern Italy, he is gathering information from the archaeological record, Latin sources, ethnohistory from Roman times and information from local residents.

Sandburg's project involves examining burial sites in the highlands of northern Italy in order to see to what extent Roman cultural influence was accepted in the peripheral villages of the Roman Empire.

"Everyone says how great the Roman Empire is, how the people of Rome loved it because they provided aqueducts so they could be clean and not have head lice anymore," Sandburg laughs. "But I wondered what the response would have been in the outlying areas, when the Roman Empire moved in and imposed itself on little tribes."

"As you move further away from the cultural centers of the Empire, there seems to be a discrete but perceptible dropping off of Roman culture," Sandburg says, scratching his beard. "It's kind of a logical thing, but no one's ever tested it. Burials seemed like a good place to start, because they're a closed context, yet they're an intimate reflection of society. In a way, they're like time capsules--by looking at the objects in them, you can get a good sense of to what extent the culture is Roman, and to what extent it's indigenous," he explains.

Highs and Lows

Sandburg got the idea for this project while he was in Italy on a Rotary Fellowship from 1980 to 1982, living simultaneously in the city of Padua and on a farm in a small, nearby village in the Alps. Commuting between the two, Sandburg noticed radical cultural and lifestyle differences between the highlands and the lowlands.

"As I went back and forth, I kept noticing lots of cultural differences. The lowlands were modernized--they had TVs and what not--while the highlands still had a more cohesive, traditional culture," the graduate of UC (Santa Barbara) says. "It occurred to me that this cultural dichotomy between the highlands and the lowlands would have had to be even greater in ancient times."

Sandburg is currently applying for fellowships to spend next year in Italy to complete fieldwork for his project on Roman culture in outlying areas.

Although Sandburg speaks fluent Italian, knows a number of regional Venetian and Alpine dialects, and can read Latin, Spanish, French and German, he says that certain aspects of fieldwork--especially communicating with natives and gaining their trust--can be extremely difficult.

He recounts the difficulties he had at the beginning of his Rotary Fellowship, when in San Gregorio nelle Alpi--the village with a population of 85 in which he lived--no one would talk to him at all for the first three months of his stay. "I don't know how I stuck it out. Things were miserable--I was beside myself with frustration," Sandburg recalls.

He finally had the opportunity to break down the culture barriers when a schoolteacher in the village asked him to teach an adult English class she was organizing. He gladly agreed. The first day of the class, Sandburg recalls smiling, "everybody in the village came--the priest, the mayor and his three daughters, the feuding grocery store owners, the pharmacist and his girlfriend." Word of his class spread across the area, and gradually the local Italians began to trust him, talk to him, and even help him with his fieldwork.

Besides teaching in the rural mountains of Italy, Sandburg has taught in the urban plains of Cambridge. Currently, he is a section leader for Peabody Professor of Archaeology Stephen Williams' course, Anthropology 139, "Fantastic Archaeology: Alternative Views of the Past."

Sandburg has also led seminars for high-school teachers on teaching archaeology in high schools. Harvard's art museums have an outreach program with Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, and Sandburg lectured on archaeology, particularly on Sardis--a long-term excavation in Turkey for which he worked for a summer--in an effort to help the teachers incorporate archaeology into the 10th and 11th grade curriculum.

"He changed my life. I was getting tired of academia where people theorize and die with their theories. He taught me that theories are to be respected, but things are allowed to change," says Michael Snyder '87, who had Sandburg as a section leader in Anthropology 100, "Introduction to Archaeology." "Now I'm excited about academia again," Snyder adds.

Teaching others about archaeology is one of the things he likes best about studying archaeology, says Sandburg, who plans to become an academic. He emphasizes the necessity of "sharing one's findings with the body politic," and his penchant for teaching came across colorfully during the interview.

To illustrate his explanation of his project in the Italian highlands, he pulled a full-color map out from a drawer to pinpoint particular locations. Togive a more concrete sense of what the smallItalian village he lived in looked like, he showedphotographs and postcards of the area, of hisfriends and the farmhouse in which he lived.

Sandburg's small room in the Cronkhite Centeroverflows with artifacts of his travels andstudies. One of his most treasured possessions isthe trowel he has used to dig for the last 12years--"My trowel is by my bedside all the time.Archaeologists get attached to their trowels," heexplains, a little sheepishly. "It's seen a lot ofplaces."

In addition to a huge collection of slides andhis pet trowel, Sandburg surrounds himself with avariety of objects he has collected here andthere, as an "urban archaeologist." As a teenager,he made friends with wreckers on constructionsites and brought pieces of buildings home withhim. "I still have a garage filled witharchitectural ornaments," he remembers.

But before he settled down to excavating inEurope and teaching in Cambridge, Sandburg visiteda lot of places, some stranger than others. Herecalls the time when after excavating in Israel,he decided to investigate a tribe of JordanianBedouins and ended up catching cholera. "I'dalways been interested in nomads," he explains. Herealized in Damascus, Syria, as he was hitchikinghome, that he was extremely sick, but it wasdifficult to do much about it immediately becauseAmerica has no diplomatic ties with Syria.

"At the time, I thought the whole thing wasvery romantic, but now I don't think so. I'drather have a nice long life and do all the thingsI want to do, and not go out in a burst of smoke,"Sandburg says. "I'm very happy working in Europeright now. I don't have to get cholera anymore.