SHORT TAKES : Kuralt on Road--No Digging!

An archeologist wants to dig up the lawn of Charles Kuralt’s vacation home, but the television newsman has been--where else--on the road.

Wesleyan University archeology Prof. John Pfeiffer believes the immaculate lawn in front of Kuralt’s home may conceal artifacts that would tell scholars more about the development of Essex as an ivory-processing center in the 19th Century.

The only obstacle has been tracking down Kuralt and getting his permission.

“I bet you he’d be so interested in this, he’d literally want to film it,” said Donald Malcarne, a graduate student working with Pfeiffer.

Kuralt gained fame for his “On the Road” series, a folksy look at the byways of American life.

Malcarne said he wrote Kuralt at his Essex address in May, has knocked on the door of the house a number of times and has called Kuralt’s office at CBS News in New York--all to no avail.

“Most weekdays, he’s traveling for ‘On the Road,’ ” said Karen Beckers, the program’s coordinator. She said Kuralt has a backlog of messages to return.

Pfeiffer and Malcarne want to dig a few 18-inch “test pits” to see what lies below Kuralt’s turf.

Beneath the lush green cover, they say, may lie a trove of ivory “notions”--eyelets, combs, perhaps even billiard ball fragments--turned out by the kind of machines first used to shape such objects out of bone.