January 31, 2000
According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, a particle cannot be observed without being altered -- a feature of the universe that has proved endlessly frustrating to physicists.
But their frustration is nothing compared to that which afflicts archaeologists, says John M. Parisi of Leawood, Kan., a former professional archaeologist who is now a plaintiffs' attorney.
In archaeology, says Parisi, the consequence of observation is destruction.
"In archaeology, you always have to justify why a site needs to be excavated," he said. "Because the reality is that excavation is destruction. And sometimes it makes more sense to just leave a site alone."
Parisi worked as an archaeologist for 10 years after he graduated in 1978 with a degree in anthropology from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Along the way, he also earned a master's degree in 1983 from the University of Kansas. He worked on digs of both prehistoric Indian and Historic Euroamerican sites throughout Kansas and Missouri, and even ranged as far afield as Egypt before leaving the field for the practice of law.
Back Yard Digs
He got his start, he said, digging in the back yard as a child. "I can remember a time when I was five or six years old playing with friends out back," he said. "My mother came out and put stuff out there for us to find -- I loved the feeling of finding things that were hidden."
His first exposure to the discipline of archaeology didn't come until college, when he took classes in ancient Greece and Rome. But his interests turned toward subjects closer to home after he confronted one of the harsh realities of life as an archaeologist: the problem of funding.
"It's very hard to get work overseas, especially if you're coming from a small midwestern school," he said. "If you're from Columbia, Yale or Harvard, you might have a shot at working in Greece. But in the end, there's a limited amount of funding out there.
"It's always a problem for archaeologists, finding enough money to eat."
Parisi ended up concentrating in the study of prehistoric Indian cultures, both as an undergraduate and in graduate school at the University of Kansas, a school that has a strong tradition in the study of the Plains Indians.
His master's thesis was suitably arcane, concerning ways to determine how artifacts were used by examining their distribution around a site.
But his interest in Indian cultures was much broader. He was particularly fascinated by the ways Indians took control of their environment. "I was a child of the '70s and had a romantic view of their way of life, the simplicity of it," he said. "But I became interested in the development of their techniques, how much change they underwent and how much of an impact they had on the environment."
It is a common misconception that Indian cultures were essentially static, he said. "The American Indians underwent an evolution from hunter-gatherer nomads to semi-permanent village dwellers to residents of permanent villages," he explained. "And they developed techniques in the manipulation of food that allowed them to make this evolution.
"Many of our foods -- corn, beans, squash, potatoes -- come from the Indians and their ways of manipulating them."
After leaving graduate school, he found it was necessary to branch out and become a "jack of all trades," at least archaeologically speaking. In addition to prehistoric Indian sites, he worked on historic sites, including excavations at Quindaro, a "free-state" town just across the Kansas-Missouri border in Kansas that had a brief life just before the Civil War.
"This town was started in 1856 and abandoned in 1859 when the river channel changed," he said. "John Brown hung around there and there have always been rumors that it was a stop on the Underground Railroad."
While working on the Quindaro project, Parisi observed that archaeology often has political implications in spite of its arcane aura. "While we were doing that dig, there was concern that we were destroying an aspect of Black history and culture," he observed. "It's similar in a way to doing archaeology in the Middle East, where everything an archaeologist does has religious -- and therefore political -- overtones.
"An archaeologist is someone who treads on someone else's land. He'd better have some political skills and be able to mollify people."
Most current archaeological work is funded under federal legislation passed in the early 1970s, said Parisi. Under that legislation, 1 percent of all funds used in disturbing land surface (to build a new sewer line, for example) is set aside for archaeological analysis and preservation.
The money is used in a three-stage process. In the first stage, the work site is surveyed for signs of archaeological remains, especially "lithic scatter," referring to stone chips that had long been buried but were brought to the surface, usually by the plough.
If remains are found, further testing is done to determine the size and likely significance of the site, he said. Then the crucial decision: whether the site should be excavated or left alone.
"A number of factors go into the decision whether to excavate a site," he explained. "For example, can the project in question, the sewer line or whatever, be redesigned so as not to disturb the site? If so, that raises the possibility that you might not go in.
"You also have to examine its likely importance," he went on. "If it's the only site of its type in the valley, you'd be more inclined to excavate. But if there are 20 just like it that have already been examined, you're not likely to learn much that is new by digging up the 21st."
Leaving a site alone is preferable in many cases, said Parisi, because of the destructive effects of excavation. "It's very difficult to preserve a site once it has been excavated," he noted.
Future techniques may also yield better results than those in current use, he pointed out. "Who knows what the archaeologists of the future will be able to find," he remarked. "Better to preserve as much as possible for techniques of the future than destroy sites unnecessarily."
On The Cheap
Although the current system does ensure that work sites are surveyed for archaeological purposes, Parisi notes that in some ways it is less than ideal, especially its reliance on competitive bidding for awarding projects.
"Under competitive bidding, there's a tendency for everything to become lowest common denominator archaeology," he said. "The process rewards those who cut costs as low as possible -- but there are many kinds of analysis that are labor intensive or are very expensive that just don't get done.
"There's a real element of doing everything on the cheap. That was one thing about the profession that I had a problem with."
The jack-of-all-trades archaeologist has to command a wide range of skills, said Parisi. A few are even useful to the attorney. Parisi recently handled a groundwater contamination case that called upon methods of analysis similar to those used in archaeology.
"Part of the problem of that case was determining what areas of the ground were contaminated," he said. "And it was similar to the testing we had to do as archaeologists to find the edges of a site.
"It was a problem of finding things that are underground -- conceptually quite similar to archaeology."
Another example is the process of "discovery" that is undertaken before a dig.
"Before you do an archaeological project, you typically do extensive research on what has been written and what is already known in a given area," he said. "What you're trying to do is plug into a preexisting knowledge base or sequence. It's similar to the way a lawyer in a products liability case tries to plug into what is known about a given product."
Once the library research is completed, the archaeologist heads into the field and the work takes on a macho quality. "In field work, there is a lot of hard physical labor," he explained. "You have to live out in the elements, in the heat and cold. You have to know how to get yourself and your project out into the woods, and do so without getting hurt.
"You begin to realize before too long that archaeology is a young man's game," he added. "Once I was out in the field for three straight months. When you begin to have a family, you start to realize that that kind of thing isn't really possible any more."
In addition to the labor involved with setting up camp and preparing the dig, fieldwork also involves the first attempts to analyze the findings. This is accomplished through photographing and making careful maps of the site. Laptop computers are also brought into service on-site for various kinds of analysis.
Once the artifacts have been taken out of the ground, the lab archaeologists take over with a wide array of highly refined tools. The best known of these is carbon dating, he noted. "But there are all kinds of pieces of specialized equipment," he added.
Although Parisi has long since given up his career as an archaeologist, he maintains an interest in his old profession. He recently took his teenage daughters to the Mayan lowlands in the Yucatan penninsula near Cancun, an area Parisi says rivals Egypt for archaeological significance.
"I bored them to death with all of this stuff," he said. "But I wanted them to see it. And they've developed a liking for it too, I think."
He also says that there are times of the year when the yearning to be out on a dig rises in him. "In the spring and the fall I really miss it," he said. "That's when I remember what it was like to be out on a dig on a beautiful day."
Missouri Lawyers Weekly
Vol.14, No.5
By Chris Brown
