Archeologist’s Find Is More Than a Game : History: A San Diego archeologist is studying a village that vanished about 6500 BC. His favorite find is a game board, which he calls ‘one of the oldest indicators that people were trying to have fun.’

San Diego State University anthropology Prof. Gary Rollefson has pulled thousands of artifacts from digs around the world. He has discovered corpses that were undisturbed for 9,000 years, and ancient plaster figurines that were crafted to honor mythical ancestors. He also has built a stunning collection of chipped-stone tools.

But his favorite find is the unassuming game board that he found in a Jordanian dig near the ancient village of Jericho. A forerunner of games still played around the world, the 8,000-year-old board is “one of the oldest indicators that people were trying to have fun, trying to enjoy themselves,” Rollefson said.

The game was an important find because it added to clues that Rollefson is using to chronicle days in the life of ‘Ain Ghazal, a settlement that, like the ancient and nearby town of Jericho, inexplicably disappeared about 6500 BC.

But finds such as Rollefson’s game board also provide the personal satisfaction that keeps pulling San Diego’s cadre of academic archeologists back to far-flung digs. “It’s a fascinating feeling to be holding (a clay object) with 9,000-year-old fingerprints still on it,” Rollefson said.

While San Diego is dotted with artifacts left by past generations, the county is far from being a hotbed of academic research.

There are dozens of trained archeologists in the county, including many SDSU anthropology graduates, who work on a contract basis with local developers. They certify that significant artifacts are not destroyed in the name of progress. San Diego’s booming economy has fueled the demand for contract archeologists, who can determine if a development threatens a potentially significant site.

But when it comes to academics who search far-flung digs for “stones and bones,” the professional community is small indeed: SDSU’s faculty includes three active archeologists, UC San Diego has no archeologists on staff, and the University of San Diego has just one active researcher on staff.

On a scale of 1 to 10--with 10 being decidedly hot--the local scene seems to be decidedly cool.

SDSU anthropology professor Joe Ball described San Diego as a 2, while Rollefson checked in with a slightly tepid 4. When archeologists make an exciting discovery, “they usually don’t remember to call San Diego,” Rollefson quipped.

Brad Bartel, an anthropology professor who also serves as associate dean of SDSU’s graduate school and research division, offered a more optimistic ranking.

“I’d give San Diego a high number, in the 7 to 8 range,” said Bartel, who directs research at the Presidio dig in San Diego and has done extensive research at Roman Empire digs in Europe.

Although few in number, San Diego archeologists have produced dramatic results at digs in Central and South America, Europe and the Middle East.

“It’s indeed a tribute to San Diego that it has people who are well known in their fields,” said Christopher Donnan, a UCLA anthropology professor who also serves as director of UCLA’s Museum of Cultural History.

Donnan is most familiar with research conducted by Alena Cordy-Collins, an anthropology professor at the University of San Diego. “She has been involved in the study of (pre-Inca civilizations) in Peru and Ecuador,” Donnan said. “She’s developed a major photographic archive of art at that time which is a major resource for understanding the early cultures of Peru.”

Like Rollefson, Cordy-Collins has her favorite find: Six ceramic pieces uncovered last summer in a pre-Inca tomb that had recently been looted. Cordy-Collins and an associate were astounded to find the pieces crafted by the Moche Culture between AD 600 and 800, because looters seldom leave important artifacts behind.

“These are fabulously crafted ceramics with exquisite artistry,” Cordy-Collins said. Eyes on the human figurines were made of beautiful lapis lazuli, and other parts were inlaid with shells.

What made the ceramic pieces even more exciting was their uncanny resemblance to several Moche artifacts unearthed 20 years earlier at a site far to the north of Cordy-Collins’ Andean site.

Researchers in Germany now are subjecting the two sets to “neutron-activation analysis” that will determine if the artifacts were crafted in the same location. That information will help Cordy-Collins determine if “there was a tie between these two locations. . . . Maybe there were trade networks, or maybe they were gifts.”

That is the kind of complex answer that archeological detectives seek to answer by following trails of civilizations that died hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago.

Rollefson is piecing together a puzzle that, when complete, might give a glimpse into the relatively advanced Early Neolithic towns and villages on the edge of the Arabian deserts that began to disappear about 6500 BC.

In the past, archeologists believed that villagers at the 35-acre ‘Ain Ghazal settlement--and similar villages such as ancient Jericho--were forced to become nomads as their crops withered during an extended drought.

But Rollefson and an international team of archeologists from Jordan, England, Canada, Australia and Japan now believe that deforestation, not drought, was to blame.

Because of evidence uncovered at the ‘Ain Ghazal dig, Rollefson believes the villagers unwittingly speeded their village’s demise by felling an increasing number of trees to burn during the production of plaster. At the same time, the village’s farmers were over-farming, and goatherds were allowing animals to devour much of the remaining vegetation.

“The combination added up to deforestation,” Rollefson said. “A whole bunch of villages just couldn’t farm anymore. They were messing around with nature without knowing what they were doing.”

Rollefson’s findings, which track the problems and promise that early civilizations met as they made the change from roaming bands to farming, have been chronicled in Science, Archaeology, Paleorient and other professional journals.

During 20 years of study in Central America, Ball has been seeking an equally complex glimpse into an earlier time: The SDSU anthropology professor is piecing together a picture of life in an agrarian village in the Maya civilization.

Archeologists have focused their work on larger cities that thrived shortly before the Maya civilization collapsed in the 9th Century. Consequently, little work has been done in rural areas, where archeologists are less likely to uncover dramatic buildings, palaces and tombs like those found in what were the civilization’s more important cities.

Large excavations of Maya villages are hampered by the region’s fast-growing vegetation, which, during the rainy season, can quickly overtake a dig and destroy buildings and artifacts. But rather than “mining or quarrying” smaller tracts in high-density areas, Ball’s team has completed traditional digs, working during dry months and protecting finds by backfilling excavations before the rainy season.

Using traditional archeological techniques at the dig in Belize, Ball’s team has exposed the buildings of several households, including floors, courtyards, porches and spinning and weaving areas. By studying artifacts, he hopes to better understand rural life in the Maya civilization.

One of Ball’s most significant discoveries was the tomb of an unidentified Maya leader who ruled over a rural valley in northwest Belize. The tomb is elaborate: The ruler was buried in a jaguar coat, and was laid on a bed of 2,000 blades fashioned from volcanic material carried from Guatemala.

“That said to us ‘big bucks,’ ” Rollefson said. “You occasionally find three or four of (the blades) in a house, and he was lying on a bed of 2,000 of them.”

Rollefson was especially intrigued by a “chocolate drinking cup” that was buried alongside the relatively minor baron. Chocolate was “the drink of the nobility” in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, according to Rollefson.

The cup unearthed last year was “pretty exciting,” Rollefson said, because, according to an inscription, it once belonged to “Smoking Squirrel . . . the most powerful king of the Eastern region of Guatemala,” who evidently gave it to the minor baron as a gift.

“It showed a pretty special relationship between a politically important (king) and the relatively minor lord,” Rollefson said.

Bartel is interested in an extremely complex relationship: that between an invading nation and the civilization that is conquered. His research spans two continents, including digs at the Presidio in San Diego and a dig in Yugoslavia that, centuries earlier, was taken over by the Roman Empire.

Using cultural artifacts found at both sites, Bartel hopes to determine if colonizers such as the Spanish in California and the Romans in what is now Europe “had the same strategy, and if the native populations would resist or if they simply went along.”

Bartel has largely worked at Sirmium, a dig in Yugoslavia that served as one of the Roman Empire’s four capitals during the 4th Century. While the town was under Rome’s command, the settlement remained ethnically diverse, Bartel said, as is witnessed by the headstones in a cemetery, the final resting place for Christians, pagans and Jews of various nationalities.

It has grown increasingly difficult for San Diego’s archeologists to find funding to support digs.

“There’s a bloodthirsty competition for money,” according to Rollefson, who has struggled each year to attract money to keep as many as 60 people busy at the ‘Ain Ghazal dig. When Rollefson returns to the field in about a year, it will be to a less-costly dig in India, with a team of just six archeologists.

Although research funding is tight, SDSU professors have won grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society, as well as other foundations. Bartel believes that SDSU has developed an outstanding reputation in the archeological world, given “the amount of NSF dollars that Gary, I and Joe have accumulated in the last decade.”

Bartel is especially proud of the NSF grants: “The success rate for those grants is abominable for archeologists,” who must compete with glamorous proposals from scientists in other fields.

Sometimes funding comes from unlikely sources: Rollefson won a small grant from a deceased Mississippi native who hoped that a dig in Jordan might uncover one of the “lost tribes” of Israel. That benefactor might be disappointed because the civilization Rollefson studied predated Judaism.