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.