Unearthing the Past

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Rob Beck’s lifelong passion for archaeology and its parent, anthropology, began at the back of a plow. As a small boy he would trail behind the equipment on his relatives’ farms in Morganton, N.C., gathering arrowheads and bits of Indian pottery. “From as early as I can remember, I was just completely fascinated,” he says.

A political science major in college, Beck couldn’t shake his boyhood interest and came to Northwestern in 1997 specifically to work with anthropology professors James Brown and Timothy Earle, whose research on complex societies had made a big impression on him.

“Jim’s background in the prehistory of eastern North America matched my own background, and Tim’s research in the Andes matched an area into which I wanted to expand,” Beck explains.

Earle, who has worked with more than 50 PhD students, praises Beck as among the very best. “He is already a mature academic, able to define a significant research question, obtain money for funding, carry out the fieldwork and write up the evidence to make a compelling case.”

Beck’s dissertation work took him to a peninsula in Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, where he participated in a survey that uncovered more than 400 new archaeological sites. He returned to excavate one of the locations and unearthed a ritual burial mound and several surrounding buildings that date back 2,500 to 3,000 years.

Back in the States, he and his colleagues continue to work at a site in Morganton where they have found the remains of a Spanish fort. “It turns out that people had been looking for this fort for the better part of a century,” Beck says. It is the earliest European settlement in the interior of North America.

According to records in libraries in Spain, Cuba and Mexico, the fort was built in the 1560s as Spain was trying to expand its influence on the continent. The fort housed 30 Spanish soldiers for about 1 1/2 years until Native Americans killed the soldiers and burned the buildings.

“We have [excavated] four burned buildings where all the Spanish artifacts are coming from,” Beck says. “We have Spanish olive jars, ceramics and pottery.” He expects to find much of the contents of the buildings intact.

Beck estimates that it will take between five and 10 years to finish work at the site. “The extent of Spain’s presence in the eastern United States is only beginning to be fully appreciated, and archaeology is playing a large role in that,” he says. With his excavation, Beck is playing no small role himself.

—T.S.