"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.