Archeologist Seeks New Digs : After 14 Years at Mission, Nicholas Magalousis Is Moving On to Explore Other Sites

Toting a pipe and dressed in shorts, hiking boots and expedition vest, Nicholas Magalousis looks like a hefty Indiana Jones.

For 14 years, the archeologist has explored Mission San Juan Capistrano, probing the crevices of adobe buildings and the ground beneath them for clues to the history of the 217-year-old structure that has been home to Indians, Spanish soldiers, Mexican ranchers and Franciscan friars.

“I call him Indiana Jones,” said Brian McInerney, director of the mission’s visitors’ center. “Nothing makes him happier than being four feet into a hole and looking at a rock.”

This insatiable curiosity brought Magalousis to the mission in 1979, starting an adventure that has converted what was once simply a beautifully landscaped tourist attraction into a highly reputable archeological research center.

But now, his curiosity is compelling him to move on.

Magalousis, a 47-year-old bachelor who has joined expeditions in Israel, Greece and Syria, has told the mission’s administration that he is ready for new challenges. Within two months, he expects to work in other parts of the world for an international organization.

This week, as he prepares to go on to something new, Magalousis reviewed his accomplishments at the mission: Involving students from UC Irvine and Chapman University in archeological digs, greatly expanding the mission’s museum, launching a building preservation campaign and fostering docent and Living History programs.

In contrast, Magalousis, an adjunct professor of anthropology and archeology at Chapman University, said when he first visited the mission, he was surprised there were no archeological digs going on and the mission museum consisted only of a niche in the gift shop.

“In 1979 we had quite a few universities in the area and I felt it was unusual not to have a field school on a site of this magnitude,” he recalled. So he persuaded Msgr. Paul M. Martin, pastor of the mission, to allow college students to begin a more scientific exploration of the mission grounds.

Over the years, Magalousis said, hundreds of students have joined in the digs, some coming from Minnesota and New York.

Magalousis takes pride that several discoveries have illuminated the mission’s history. One of the foremost was the identification of a metal works, the oldest of its kind so far discovered in California.

Previously, the two large furnaces were thought to be ovens that Indian workers used to melt fat into liquid to form soap and candles. Instead, these 18th-Century, state-of-the-art Spanish furnaces were used to heat iron ore and turn it into pure iron to make wrought iron for farming and religious implements.

Magalousis said that identifying the furnaces was accomplished with the help of a Mission Viejo metallurgist, Ted Koppenaal.

Similarly, Magalousis credits a mission docent who researched wine production in missionary days so a vineyard could be planted at the mission with a variety of grapes authentic to that era.

Magalousis said his role was to develop an environment that would encourage others, in part by identifying the archeological and historical puzzles that need to be solved.

“As I saw it, (Magalousis) was a gathering point,” Koppenaal said. “He gathered people from a wide variety of technologies and got them interested in the mission and provided them with what he could to help them along.”

Much of what Magalousis and his students have learned about the mission is contained in a treasure trove of published reports that line a bookshelf in his office. Copies of the same documents, he said, are also available to researchers in the Mission San Juan Capistrano archives and at the Santa Barbara mission, UCLA and the Sherman Foundation in Corona del Mar.

Magalousis strengthened the mission’s relationship with the local community of Juaneno Indians by respecting their cultural values and seeking their cooperation.

“He incorporated Indians into roles in his Living History program, as advisers to his museum and as participants to his archeological digs so he could share with them directly what he uncovered about them,” said Paul Apodaca, a Navajo Indian and curator of American Indian art at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana. “That is highly unusual among Southern California archeologists.”

Magalousis said that under his direction, students have gathered at least 20 hours of interviews with descendants of local Indians.

There is still plenty of exploration to be done at the mission by other archeologists, Magalousis said. “There is probably enough archeology to keep researchers busy for the next 100 years.”

If he were to return in 20 years, he said, he “would like to see the whole site excavated” and an educational center established to teach budding archeologists.