Culture : Life in the Trenches: On a Dig, History Is the Goal : Archeology is a bustling business in the Mideast, but particularly so on the artifact-rich island of Cyprus.

“Yeah, there’s always the scent of coconut around here,” Nancy Serwint conceded, a slow smile lighting her bronzed face. Suntan lotion--coconut scented or otherwise--is one of the requisites of an archeological dig, along with trowels, whisk brooms and dedication.

Prof. Serwint teaches Greek and Roman art at Arizona State University, and for the past eight summers she has come here to probe the soil of northwestern Cyprus for evidence of a culture that flourished more than 2,500 years ago.

She receives no pay, leaves a “very understanding” boyfriend behind in Tempe and spends two months under a hot Mediterranean sun. “We do it because we love it,” she explained. With a passion, in Serwint’s case.

Bounding over dirt tracks at the wheel of the expedition’s Land Rover, the professor heads for the Peristeries site, where three years of digging has revealed the stone and mud-brick walls of a pagan sanctuary of the 6th Century BC. The convincing discovery was a cache of terra cotta figurines, votive statues offered in prayer to the gods.

“We’ve uncovered nearly 5,000 of them,” said Serwint, an expert on the little figures, molded in remarkable detail, their wide, stylized eyes staring out across the centuries. Votive art was obviously big business, and the gods were well entreated during what archeologists call the Cypro-Archaic Period.

Across the breadth of this island and on the Middle East mainland beyond, the artifacts and architecture of ancient civilizations mix with modern life, a heritage exploited and embraced.

Egypt’s sphinx, Israel’s Masada and Jordan’s rose-red ruins of Petra are symbols of their cultures; they inspire a silent sense of awe and turn a pretty tourist dollar. The past is for sale today, mainland merchants tell visitors, and “licensed” dealers in antiquities proffer frail examples of Roman glassware and tiny sandstone oil lamps.

History is business in the Middle East, whether long recorded or lurking under a few feet of soil. Even here on Cyprus, where the pursuit of archeology has been more marked by academic professionalism, dig leaders this summer have been brushing up their spiels for the inevitable arrival of tour groups on the grounds. It will help pay the bills.

The commercial aspects, however, are largely lost on most archeologists. Theirs is a profession whose rewards come in discovery and understanding. Success fills the ego, not the bank account. Their shop is the dig site.

Archeologists ask questions. What is this thing, what was its use and who used it? With more physical evidence, they start forming answers: This wall circles the settlement. These people had enemies, or feared they might.

The professionals describe their work more elegantly. “Archeology is the study of the material remains of human thoughts and actions,” said Stuart Swiny, who has excavated sites in France, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Cyprus, and since 1980 has been director of the Cyprus American Archaelogical Institute.

Swiny’s institute, based in Nicosia, the Cypriot capital, and funded in part by the U.S. Information Agency, is a research center and unofficial clearinghouse for information on archeological expeditions.

This rocky island, tucked deep in the eastern Mediterranean off the Turkish and Syrian coasts, has more archeological sites per square mile than any other country, Swiny estimated. Its ancient cities may not have the magic names of those burnished by early written records--neither Babylon nor Ur, Jericho nor Troy--but they are no less a temptation to a professional archeologist.

“There, in Mesopotamia, we know the names of the kings,” Swiny explained. “We don’t know as much about the people here. Cyprus was never a power. It did not have a big population. But is was rich in agriculture, rich in copper and it had timber.”

Through the centuries, those riches drew settlers, traders and armies from the Neolithic Period onward, and the coastal areas are covered with evidence of their culture. “There’s pottery here,” an archeologist will shout to his colleagues on a field survey of a likely site. The broken bits of ceramic, churned up by a farmer’s plow, are usually the first sure sign that some work of man lies below the soil.

In Cyprus, the government’s Department of Antiquities handles requests for digs from foreign expeditions, and it receives high praise for its efficiency, particularly in comparison to the bureaucratic nightmares encountered elsewhere in the region.

No archeological find--pot, figurine or bronze spearhead--is allowed to leave. They are turned over to the government for possible museum display, and the archeologist leaves only with his notes, photos and measurements--the material of the reports he will write to fix his footing on the academic ladder. It’s a publish-or-perish discipline. But it’s not dull.

“Now look at this, look at this,” bubbled David S. Reese, a Cambridge University Ph.D and research associate at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Reaching into the wooden shelves of a stuffy storeroom in the southern Cypriot village of Episkopi, Reese pulled out a plastic bag containing the jawbones of a pygmy hippopotamus. “We’ve got 125 hippos and two pygmy elephants so far,” Reese said, meeting a visitor in standard field attire--shorts, no shirt and sandals.

Reese, his wife Catherine, and a UC Riverside graduate, Gwyn Alcock, were “tagging and bagging” the bits of bones found over the past eight years at a collapsed cave on Akrotiri Peninsula, the most electrifying prehistorical find in Cyprus. Carbon dated at 8,200 BC, some of the bones have been burned, and bits of flint were found in the same site, suggesting to archeologists that early man had killed the hippos, cooked them and eaten them.

If so, several sizzling conclusions can be drawn: that man came to Cyprus almost 2,000 years earlier than previously believed and that these first Cypriots hunted the hippos and elephants to extinction, a disappearance whose cause had previously puzzled scientists.

These are the answers that archeologists dig for. Sometimes they come suddenly, like the Akrotiri evidence. Other times it’s hard, plodding work.

East of Akrotiri, near the village of Zygi, Brandeis University’s Ian and Alison Todd, a husband-and-wife archeological team, have been working for more than a decade in a coastal valley and have dug both neolithic and Bronze Age sites.

“I wanted to do a study of an area to see how life has changed from its earliest occupation to the present,” Todd said. “I talked to the Cypriot authorities and they suggested this valley. It’s been perfect.

“We have found evidence of about 140 sites and we have excavated four. Every 500 meters up the valley floor, we have cut a trench to see what’s there.” His expeditions have found a Late Bronze Age town as large as any on Cyprus, and at a neolithic site called Tenta, they uncovered the earliest-known wall painting on the island, a red human figure with arms outstretched.

Like most expeditions, the Todds’ depends on student labor, which explains the summer digs. Here in Polis on the north coast, the Princeton-Cyprus Expedition under the direction of Prof. William Childs is digging at three sites in the city known in ancient times as Marion and later Arsinoe. The stoop labor is done by work boys, young locals whom Childs pays about $80 a week out of his $100,000 budget for the two-month season. Graduate students and doctoral candidates--”pre-docs” in the parlance--are assigned as “trench masters,” overseeing the work boys. Everybody pulls the duty.

“I came here to be the architect’s assistant, and here I am in the trench,” laughed Amy Cassens from the University of Illinois, where she is an art history major at the Champaign-Urbana campus.

The students learn quickly under the direction of Childs, Serwint, his assistant and other old hands. The dirt is peeled back with small hand picks, dustpans and brushes. Alert eyes watch the surface for signs of anything but dirt.

On a trench overseen by UC Berkeley student Cristina de la Torre, a graduate of Marymount High School in Los Angeles, work boys were using dental tools to separate dirt from the firmer substance of a mud brick. Even at meals, the students said, they had formed the habit of eating a lasagna-like dish layer by layer.

While the broad goal is to uncover the layout of a site--the walls, floors and columns--the thrill comes in a find: a figurine, a pot or some other man-made object.

A 20-year-old volunteer from Princeton, N.J., was credited with the discovery in Ashkelon, Israel, announced last week, of a figurine believed to be a precursor of the biblical golden calf that enraged Moses when he descended from Mt. Sinai.

“I was watching the trench when one of the boys uncovered this lovely little terra cotta head,” recalled Sharon Girard, a computer specialist who had been drafted to trench-master duty here in Polis that day. “Well, I shrieked. It was so wonderful. All the old timers looked at me like I was nuts.”

The old timers also remember the heyday of American archeology abroad, the 1950s when there was plenty of money for expeditions. Times are tougher now. In a typical year, one of the professors here said, one or two good jobs might open up in the archeology departments of American universities, and there will be five or more candidates applying for each one. Many of the grad students and pre-docs working summer digs will never make the archeology faculties, opting instead for related fields like art history or leaving education altogether.

At the top of the trade, as a tenured professor in a top archeology department, the pay is about $40,000 a year, so the major rewards must be in the work itself--the travel, the comradery of a dig, the intellectual challenge of breaking the riddle of a broken wall.

Princeton’s Childs tries to shape his digs as a teaching experience, both for the participants and those who read the results of his archeology. “If you study art, you can visualize the Parthenon, but how do you visualize how the Athenians lived?” he explained. “I want to paint a picture of antiquity that people can’t have any other way.”