20 years of digging through the past

By Robert J. Cyr

Published: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 12:13 AM EDT

It sounds like the opening lines to a script for a lost episode of an Indiana Jones film: Two boys tumbling down a hillside at a gravel mine one weekend knock loose human skulls that come rolling after them.

Cut to a team of scientists with gear in tow, wiping their brows as they slowly unearth an ancient cemetery.

It’s a scene State Archeologist Nicholas F. Bellantoni remembers well — the 1994 dig at a rock pit in Griswold that yielded the bones of 29 people, the ruins of an 18th-century farm family burial plot.

The dig made headlines and showed up in magazines and newspapers around the country as Bellantoni and his crew dispelled an age-old New England vampire myth that the undead creatures were exhumed and re-buried with their bones rearranged to prevent them from rising from the grave, he said.

Bellantoni found that one rearranged skeleton showed evidence the man died from tuberculosis.

“What I do is anthropology of the dead,” he said. “We have the same questions an anthropologist would ask, such as things surrounding economics, art, and other facets of a culture, but we get our answers out of the ground.”

But Bellantoni is a far cry from the wisecracking, whip-wielding character made famous by actor Harrison Ford. Bellantoni says his first encounter with archeology was something of an accident, a passion he didn’t discover until he was 25, a sophomore in college, and had just spent four years in the Navy.

“I was not a very good student when I was younger, I was rather apathetic,” he said. “I had no real ambitions that way. Once I took an anthropology course, a lightening bolt went off in my head.”

He graduated from Central Connecticut State University in 1976 and later earned his Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Connecticut.

In 1988, a few months after receiving his doctorate, he was named state archeologist and head of the newly formed Connecticut Office of State Archeology, based out of the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History at UConn.

The real estate and economic boom of 1980s worried many environmentalists and anthropologists, who were concerned that important burial sites and artifacts were being covered up by burgeoning development, or worse — destroyed.

Scientists petitioned the legislature to establish a state department to oversee land preservation, and it passed, with Bellantoni at the helm.

“The future is a sacred place for Americans and the frontier spirit, but we need to keep record of the past as well,” he said. “I don’t necessarily preserve artifacts and that’s all. The past is important because it gives us all a heritage, an identity as humans and as Americans. Our behaviors didn’t develop over night.”

The department recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and Bellantoni has had a hand in helping it to frequently make the news, most recently by debunking a staged Native American burial site in the eastern part of the state, he said. The items — stone bowls and tools — were determined to be machined and not manmade, he said.

“The past is very important to people today, and how that past is interpreted,” he said. “They will create a site to make people understand the past the way they understand it.”

Bellantoni regularly works with state police to help identify human remains and, along with teaching at UConn, oversees more than 600,000 artifacts.

And one relatively new area of study at the department — underwater archaeology — is already drawing interest from Indian tribes near the shoreline, he said.

“I don’t know of a more intriguing species than humans,” Bellantoni said. “We not only have a biological element, but a cultural element as well. We keep asking those basic questions of who are we, where do we come from.”

Strangely enough, the movie sensation Indiana Jones that first appeared in theaters in 1981, long before the department’s founding, has recently released its fourth installment, certain to foster a new generation of would-be archaeologists, he said.

“It wouldn’t be hard to find many archeologists and anthropologists today, from different generations, who will admit that they got into the field because they saw an Indiana Jones film,” Bellantoni said. “But it’s important to remember that’s all good fun. He destroys a lot of things. And not once do you see him taking measurements. So it’s a double-edged sword, but great fun.”

Another downside of the cavalier type of treasure hunting that might be inspired by the films is vandalism, he said.

“We don’t want people to get the impression that things have value and can be mined,” he said. “Private mining is a problem.”

Bellantoni said he’s the type that prefers to work behind the scenes. After the release of one of the earlier Indiana Jones films, he turned down an offer from NBC’s “Today Show” to debate relics with Harrison Ford, and has tried to avoid the limelight since, he said.

“For some reason, I don’t think either us would have been interested in that,” he said.

For now, Bellantoni will be busy with the many lectures, field reviews, and studies he conducts each year, including maintaining more than 5,000 site maps and 20 excavations, he said.

“It’s just amazing work,” he said. “It’s new and amazing every day.”