HARVARD ARCHAEOLOGISTS and the SEARCH FOR THE ANCIENT PAST

Bullwhips.

The Holy Grail.

The Ark of the Covenant.

These are the big screen images of the adventurous world in which the archaeologist dwells.

While Harrison Ford and the multi-million dollar Indiana Jones saga have glorified archaeology as a pursuit of mild-mannered archaeologists say their jobs are often fairly pedestrian.

With a few life-threatening exceptions that is.

"On several occasions I have shot mamba, which are the most poisonous snakes around. The snakes are extremely fast," says Clay Professor of Archaeology Nicolaas J. van der Merwe. He encountered the snakes while surveying a South African game reserve for possible Iron Age vilage sites.

"It's a hell of a shock running into the big black mambas that are 12 feet [long]," he says. "The ones I shot were in fact usually right around where we lived, like in the house."

But braving the dangers of idyllic savannahs in search of ancient villages is only one part of archaeological field work, scholars say. In between the thrills are hours and hours of field work--digging, sifting, sorting and collecting.

"The whole process can be tedious and boring, but if you keep in mind this is the only way you can find out what happened in the past, it's exciting," says Professor of Anthropology Ofer Bar-Yosef.

Not only boring, but sometimes futile, says Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Hung Wu. "In China, I went to dig some tombs, so we spent 20 days going layer by layer by layer [of dirt]."

"That kind of excitement becomes heightened in the process. The use of different tools--at the beginning you can use a spade," he says. "Finally, you have to use your fingers. You don't want to destroy anything.[In the end] we found nothing."

Harvard archaelogists--who are drawn from a number of departments but come together under an umbrella committee--say that the monotony of field work is more than made up for by the joy of fitting together the pieces of an ancient puzzle.

"It's exciting because you feel like you are digging in the dirt of one of the earliest villages ever known," says Bar-Yosef, who has excavated some of the oldest sites in Israel.

Bar-Yosef says that the study of archaelogy can give the scientist an almost superhuman perspective on the course of history. The ability to analyze changes that span generations is a powerful one, he says.

"It trains you to remove yourself from the flow of history, to look as an outsider and analyze," he says.

Most recently, Bar-Yosef has been working on a village estimated to be at least a million years old. He says he is trying to discover whether the first humans descended from one ancestor--the so-called "African Eve"--and migrated to the Middle East or whether they developed simutaneously in different regions.

In addition to sheding light on the origins of the species homo sapiens, archaeology is also unearthing clues about the development of complex societies.

David G. Mitten, Loeb professor of art and archaeology, has been excavating a Lydian and Greco-Roman site called Sardis in present-day Turkey.

"The high point of our work there was about 27 years ago when we found a huge Roman synagogue from about the third or fourth or fifth century A.D.," says Mitten.

Mitten has encountered several other "fantastic" finds in his excavations of the Hellenistic world. At the Sanctuary of Poseidon in Cypress, Greece, he and his colleagues discovered three anceint coins struck during the Persian Empire.

"We were surprised to find them there. Maybe they were gifts to the god and the temple or offerings of some kind. We are still not sure why they were there," says Mitten.

While Mitten researches the development of ancient Greek society, Lawrence E. Stager '65, Dorot professor of the archaeology of Israel, has been putting together clues about ancient seafaring cultures of the Near East.

Stager, who directs a dig in Ashkelon, Israel, theorizes that one of the series of cultures that lived in the city--Phoenicians, Persians, Egyptians or Greeks--was especially fond of dogs. So fond that the people carved out a prime piece of coastal property for a pet cemetery, he says.

"We now have over 300 dog burials that have been found. They are individually buried in pits--we don't find any offerings to them," he says. "They last for about 50 years. From about 500 to 450 B.C. they were buried extensively in this area. We still don't know who buried them or why they are there. Every year I come up with a different explanation."

Whether they are solving conundrums at the root of human history or painting a picture of ancient civilization, archaelogists agree that their work is often subject to the whims of chance. Scientists may spend years surveying land in search of a site or they may stumble upon entire buried cities while looking for small hunter-gatherer dwellings.

"One of the great things about archaeology is the sense of discovery. Most of it is fundamentally a series of clues. You rarely get the mesage delivered to you on a piece of table like Indy Jones," says Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology Stephen Williams. "The sense of discovery keeps you going."

No avenue should be left unexplored, says Williams, who specializes in Native American cultures in the Southestern U.S. He has often discovered sites based solely on the myths and legends told to him by members of the community. On one dig several years ago, an old man kept nagging Williams, insisting that he knew of a valuable Native American site.

When the Harvard scholar finally acquiesced to the old man's wishes, just days before Williams left the excavation town, he practically stepped on bits of pottery. "When I went down [to the site] I picked up an arrowhead--now dated from about 6000 B.C.," he says.

Emily D.T. Vermeule, Zemurray and StoneRadcliffe professor, had a similar experience while exploring a Bronze Age site in Greece. "Some peasants came and said 'Want to see a nice tomb?' We all hopped on our horses and rode for two hours into the middle of nowhere. You couldn't see much [of the tomb] because the tomb had all collapsed," says Vermeule.

After an assistant had brushed debris off the tomb's wall, he discovered an inscription.

"By god there it was...a big Minoan mason's mark all over the facade of the tomb. It was the first time we ever understood that Cretan architects were building Greek tombs for Greek princes," says Vermeule.

Archaelogy as Academic Discipline

Bar-Yosef's groundbreaking work on human origins, and the scholarship of many of his colleagues, has bolstered the standing of archaeology as an academic discipline, scholars say.

"For years, archaeology was thought of at Harvard as not being a field but a technique--people didn't understand that it was cultural history," says Vermeule, who chairs the Committee on Archaeology.

While field work is still at the core of the pursuit, a number of other disciplines have augmented archaeology analysis in recent years, scholars say. Specifically, new dating and analysis techniques have increased the role of laboratory work after excavation, and ancient writing and linguistic experts have added their knowledge to the increasingly interdisciplinary field.

"Digging is a crucial part of archaeology, but it's only one piece of the puzzle. It's the part of the puzzle that takes the shortest amount of time," says Lecturere in Anthropology Robert E. Murowchick.

"In the field this summer we will have a geologist, a metallurgist, a conservationist, [a] physical anthropologist [and a] botanist. There's a continual interaction during the time we are actually digging," says Stager. More intensive artifact and lab analysis are deferred to a laboratory in Jerusalem or the Semitic Museum at Harvard. which Stager directs, he says.

As one of the pioneers of an isotope tracing process that indicates the composition of diets in early humans, van der Merwe is a good example of the wide range of scientists that have broadened archaeological inquiry.

"You just do the collecting in the field and get the samples into condition so that you can travel with them [to the lab]," says van der Merwe.

"It's much more of a team effort now because nobody can specialize in all aspects," says Murowchick.

Despite the increasingly technical nature of their field, many archaeologists say that it is still the lure of the exotic, and the quest of unlocking the secrets of the past, that is at the heart of archaeology.

"I grew up in Africa and have just a very different idea about what it is that makes life worth while," says van der Merwe. "Traipsing around in the bushes is one of those."