The cheers could be heard a hemisphere away. High in the Peruvian Andes, at a ceremonial site dating from the first millennium B.C., anthropological sciences associate professor John Rick and his volunteer crew discovered a chamber tomb in July that held the remains of at least two adults and two children, plus 10 perfectly preserved pots.
“Things have really been popping,” Rick said in a telephone interview from a restaurant in the town of San Pedro de Chavín (population 2,000). “And there’s another find that has us buzzing: a conch shell from the waters of Ecuador that was part of the ritual gear people used in the temples.”
If Rick was elated, the 15 undergraduates who flew to Lima and survived a jolting 10-hour bus ride into the north-central sierra were just as enthusiastic. “Uncovering the jaguar plaques was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done,” says Parker VanValkenburgh. Also on his top-10 list: exploring underground passageways and pondering what the excavations at Chavín de Huántar suggest about social processes and labor organization. The local chocolate pudding, he adds, is “out of this world.”
VanValkenburgh, ’03, will soon declare Stanford’s newest major: the interdisciplinary program in archaeology. Approved by the Faculty Senate in January, the program brings together professors from anthropological sciences, cultural and social anthropology, classics, geophysics, and geology and environmental sciences. Students can choose from research projects in Sicily and Turkey or at the Stanford mansion on campus and the Presidio in San Francisco.
Research funding from the office of the vice provost for undergraduate education enabled VanValkenburgh and seven others to join the Chavín dig. “Students used to be strapped for money in the field and had to think twice about buying a soft drink at dinner,” Rick says. “Now the project is telling them that they’re valued researchers and workers.”
And work they do—digging, screening, cleaning, weighing, bagging and cataloging artifacts alongside 15 fellow travelers on the Alumni Association’s first-ever research expedition. The crew is also learning to operate ground-penetrating radar equipment and is using laser technologies to measure small, dark, enclosed spaces.
In the six years he’s been excavating the site, Rick has unearthed two temple buildings and 26 underground labyrinths that look strikingly like the passageways on Captain Kirk’s starship Enterprise.
The galactic analogy comes from a joke slide in one of Rick’s lectures for Introduction to Prehistoric Archaeology. Listening to the professor talk about his self-described “lifetime love affair” with the subject makes students want to dig right in, VanValkenburgh says. “He could talk about pocket-lint chemistry and I would leave the room wanting to spend the rest of my life committed to it.”
