Archaeological Biography of Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D., Andean and North American Archaeologist
Summary of National and International Archaeological Expeditions, Federally Mandated Programs, and Applied Technology Initiatives
GeospatialArchaeology.com Ver. 128 — Rev. 9-30-2026 Note: Web links throughout this document are under revision due to recent hosting platform software updates; Some hyperlinked source files may be temporarily unavailable; please contact jwgnyny@gmail.com |
Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. |
Contents
A. National and International Grants and Awards (1967–1971)
B. National and International Andean Pre-Inca Expeditions and Programs (1963–2004)
B.1 1963–1964 — Early Field Training, California
B.2 1965 — San Dieguito Discovery, Buena Vista Lake, California
B.4 Early Summer 1968 — Huaca Facho, Peru
B.5 Late Summer 1968 — Huari, Ayacucho and Chumbao Valley, Andahuaylas Survey
B.6 Summers 1968 & 1969 — Cuzco with Dr. Rowe
B.7 1969 — Pampachiri Expedition
C-1 1965 — A San Dieguito Component at Buena Vista Lake, California
C-2 1968–1971 — An Ancient Gold Worker’s Tool Kit — The Earliest Metal Technology in Peru
D. Invited International Scientific Missions and Exchanges (1977–2009)
D.1 1982 — UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello Visiting Scholar, Peru
D.2 1992 — U.S.-Russian Citizen Ambassador Program, Russian Institute of Archaeology, Moscow
D.4 1999 — Invited Symposium Paper, United Nations Headquarters, New York City
D.5 2000 — Invited Visiting Scholar, Office of the Mayor of Budapest, Hungary
D.6 2009 — Invited Visiting Scholar, VU University Amsterdam / Erfgoed Nederland
E. Major Non-Federal Archaeological and Applied Technology Projects (1976–2004)
Supporting Primary Documents
Doc. 1 Grossman 1971a — Fulbright Interim Field Report, Andahuaylas, Peru
Doc. 2 Grossman 1971b — Fulbright Final Field Report, Andahuaylas, Peru
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Preface
Joel W. Grossman received his B.A. in Anthropology (1967) and his Ph.D. in Peruvian and North American archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, with the fiscal support of the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Fellowship, and a UC Berkeley Special Career Fellowship (Grossman 1968, 1970–1971).
Dr. Grossman’s scientific accomplishments include major prehistoric and historic discoveries in coastal and desert areas of California, the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, the north coast desert of Peru, and the south-central Andes of Peru. His major discoveries include the earliest evidence of New World metallurgy and the deeply buried remains of the original early seventeenth-century shoreline block of the Dutch West India Company at Pearl Street, recovered largely intact beneath eight to twelve feet of urban landfill in Lower Manhattan, New York (Grossman et al. 1983, 1985; Grossman 2003, 2011, 2022b).
In South America, he discovered and excavated the earliest evidence of pre-Inca gold working — a gold-worker’s tool kit found together with fifteen 3,500-year-old burials — establishing the origins of New World metallurgy at 1,500 cal BC (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 2013, 2022a).
In Puerto Rico, he was selected by the USEPA to plan and direct the emergency, geophysics-based, targeted discovery and rescue excavation of two prehistoric Taino sites in the path of a $100 million federal work stoppage (Grossman et al. 1988, 1990).
His first published article in Andean archaeology documented a cache of eleven ceramic press-molds recovered from a looted burial at the pre-Inca temple mound of Huaca Facho in the Lambayeque Valley, under the direction of Dr. Christopher Donnan (UCLA) — published in 1969–1970 in the Berkeley Institute of Andean Studies journal Ñawpa Pacha (Grossman 1969–1970).
As of September 9, 2026, Dr. Grossman has authored or co-authored 123 publications and multi-agency government reports and 42 invited national and international conference and Symposium papers. His published work has been viewed 7,664 times on ResearchGate and cited there over 4,000 times. In addition to this broad-based national and international readership, he served as the New World Editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Annual Review of New World Archaeology, which he researched and wrote for sixteen years (1979–1995). The annual contribution and summary of Old World discoveries were authored by Dr. Robert J. Braidwood, of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute, the leading international expert on European and Near Eastern archaeology.
A. National and International Early Field Training, Grants, and Awards (1963–1971)
(a) Early Archaeological Training (1963–1967)
1. Summer 1963 — UCLA Archaeological Field School, Cedar City, Utah. Dr. Grossman began his archaeological training as a student in UCLA’s Archaeological Field School at Cedar City, Utah, his first formal introduction to field methods and excavation technique.
2. Summer 1963 — Archaeological Survey, Big Tujunga, California. Continuing that same season, Dr. Grossman served on a UCLA Archaeological Survey crew conducting a field survey at Big Tujunga, California.
3. Spring 1964 — Lake Mojave Survey, Baker, California. Dr. Grossman served as a crew member on a UCLA Archaeological Survey of the ancient dry lake bed at Lake Mojave, near Baker, California.
4. Summer 1964 — Philmont Scout Ranch, Cimarron, New Mexico. Dr. Grossman served as a field school student and field assistant archaeologist at Philmont Scout Ranch, Cimarron, New Mexico, supervising excavations of Pueblo pit-house and cliff-house ruins in the Four Corners region.
5. Summer 1965 — Buena Vista Lake (Ker-116), California. Dr. Grossman served as Assistant Field Director, under the California Division of Beaches and Parks, directing excavation of the deeply buried early San Dieguito occupation at Buena Vista Lake (site Ker-116) in the San Joaquin Valley (see Section B.2 below for full description).
6. Summer 1967 — Puente Rincón (SBA-1), Santa Barbara/Carpinteria, California. Dr. Grossman served as Crew Chief, under Dr. Keith Johnson of the UCLA Archaeological Survey, on the excavation of the Puente Rincón site (SBA-1).
7. Summer 1967 — SDI-777, San Diego, California. Dr. Grossman served as a crew member on a UCLA Archaeological Survey excavation of site SDI-777, San Diego, California.
(b) Grants and Awards.
1. February 1967 — Newhouse Grant-in-Aid. Awarded a Newhouse Grant-in-Aid in February 1967, supporting Dr. Grossman’s undergraduate archaeological training and research.
2. 1968 — Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellowship (FAFP), Peru. Awarded under the direction of Dr. Christopher C. Donnan, UCLA, supporting summer field training on the north coast (Lambayeque Valley) and in the central highlands (Ayacucho) of Peru. Combined with the following year's Ford Foundation fellowship (Item 4), the two summer awards are estimated at approximately $5,000 total; the exact figure is not yet itemized, pending feedback from the Ford Foundation archives.
3. 1968–1969 — National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Grant, Peru. Supported pre-doctoral archaeological field research in the south-central highlands of Peru, funding the first phase of survey and excavation in the Province of Andahuaylas, Apurímac, Peru. [Exact award amount not yet itemized — please provide if available.]
4. 1969 — Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellowship (FAFP), Peru. Awarded under the direction of Dr. John H. Rowe, UC Berkeley, supporting a second field season in Andahuaylas, Apurímac, Peru. See Item 2 for the combined, estimated award total for both summers.
5. 1970–1971 — United States Department of State Fulbright Doctoral Fellowship; and UC Berkeley Special Career Fellowship — Highest Graduate Award of the Dean’s Office, Berkeley Campus, University of California, Berkeley. The United States Department of State and Institute of International Education (IIE) Fulbright Doctoral Fellowship supported Dr. Grossman’s second season of field research in Andahuaylas, Apurímac, Peru, culminating in the discovery of the earliest evidence of metal technology in the New World at the site of Waywaka. Held concurrently, Dr. Grossman was awarded the highly prized Special Career Fellowship by the Dean’s Office of the Berkeley campus of the University of California, Berkeley, conferred on a single recipient per university, which provided additional support for the same field program.
6. 2013 — Hudson River Foundation (HRF) Grant No. 003/11A (Grossman), Fort Edward, New York. Awarded $16,578 in 2013 dollars (equivalent to approximately $24,144 in 2026 purchasing power) by the Hudson River Foundation, with the study managed and submitted through the Hudson River Environmental Society, to a three-member research team: Dr. Joel W. Grossman (Grossman and Associates, Inc.); Dr. Lucille Johnson, Vassar College and the Hudson River Environmental Society; and Dr. Dorothy Peteet, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University. The grant supported geoarchaeological and AMS radiocarbon-dating research documenting the pre-contact and early historic occupation sequence along the upper Hudson River at Fort Edward, New York (Grossman et al. 2013).
Combined, the NSF Research Grant, Foreign Area Training Fellowships (FAFP), and Fulbright Doctoral Fellowship supporting this two-season Andean fieldwork program totaled approximately $15,300 in 1969 dollars — equivalent to roughly $139,208 in 2026 purchasing power. Together with the 2013 Hudson River Foundation grant of $24,144 in 2026 purchasing power, the combined total of all listed grants and awards equals approximately $163,352. The UC Berkeley Special Career Fellowship, held concurrently, was not separately itemized in dollar terms.
B. National and International Andean Pre-Inca Expeditions and Programs (1963–2004)
1. 1963–1964 — Early Field Training, California and the American Southwest. Dr. Grossman’s career began in 1963, immediately upon his graduation from high school in California. Fascinated by archaeology from an early age, he was admitted, upon graduation, into UCLA’s senior and graduate-level Archaeological Field School, held at Cedar City, Utah (Summer 1963), where he trained in archaeological field logistics and the excavation of early semi-subterranean Puebloan pit houses.
This early field experience led to his first professional appointment as a crew chief supervising excavations of Pueblo pit house and cliff-house ruins at Cimarron Boy Scout Ranch in the Four Corners region.
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Fig. B.2-1. Buena Vista Lake artifacts from the deeply buried early occupation stratum: a, scraper; b, projectile point base; c, projectile point fragment; d–f, crescent fragments; g, atlatl engaging spur; h, worked bone fragment; i, micro-core; j, human cranial fragment; k–l, knife fragments. From Fredrickson and Grossman 1977, Fig. 4, The Journal of California Anthropology, p. 182. |
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2. 1965 — Discovery of a San Dieguito Occupation at Buena Vista Lake, San Joaquin Valley, California. By the time he matriculated at UC Berkeley as a third-year undergraduate in anthropology and archaeology, Dr. Grossman had already accrued four years of advanced archaeological field training. In 1965, while still an undergraduate Junior, he was appointed by the State of California — at the recommendation of Francis A. Riddell, Chief Archaeologist of the California State archaeology program — to co-direct, in tandem with John Waller, the deep-stratigraphic phase of the Buena Vista Lake project in the San Joaquin Valley of central California. Waller coordinated camp logistics and personnel functions, while Grossman planned and directed the archaeological discovery and excavation of the deeply buried early occupation deposits identified the prior season (1964, under Dr. David Fredrickson) beneath approximately twelve feet of cement-like caliche.
The 1965 excavation of the early occupation levels took place under extreme conditions: difficult-to-excavate hardpan and air temperatures reaching 110°F. A heavy bulldozer cut a 12-by-55-meter (40-by-180-ft) trench through the twelve-foot overburden to within centimeters of the underlying deeply buried early cultural layers, after which the archaeological crew excavated by hand using custom-made, piston-like cutting tools to expose one of the earliest prehistoric occupations of the western United States: the California San Dieguito culture.
Despite the extreme heat and difficult conditions, the team recovered a wide range of well-preserved and stratigraphically undisturbed San Dieguito artifacts — including fresh-water shell fragments, chalcedony flakes, a finely shaped serpentine atlatl weight, and well-preserved chipped-stone crescents — an intact sample that proved to be the best-preserved case of the San Dieguito culture in western North America. A radiocarbon determination funded by the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company and processed by Teledyne Laboratories (1968) originally returned a date of 5650 B.C.; recalibration using modern calibration curves (IntCal20) now places the find at ca. 7,650 cal BP (Grossman 1968b; Fredrickson and Grossman 1977). The latest C14 determinations (samples LJ-1356 and LJ-1357), calibrated using the latest calibration curve, IntCal20, at two sigma, are cal BC 8229–6367; Median Probability: 7178 BP — approximately 1,000 years earlier than the original dating indicated.
3. 1967 — Puente Rincón (SBA-1) Crew Chief, Santa Barbara, California. Following his 1963 graduation from the Graduate-level UCLA Archaeological Fieldschool in Cedar City, Utah, in the summer of 1967, he was recruited to be a Crew Chief under Dr. Keith Johnson of the UCLA Archaeological Survey in Los Angeles, California, to help direct the excavation of a long series of occupation deposits running from the shoreline to the crest of the multicomponent prehistoric site known as Puente Rincón (SBA-1) in Santa Barbara, California. In this capacity, he supervised the excavation of a 7,000-year-old prehistoric occupation zone at the crest of a ridge of prehistoric deposits above the shoreline where Cabrillo had landed in 1538. It was here that he first deployed applied technology to define the limits of a buried semi-subterranean pit house: by sampling soil to measure pH across a grid and mapping variations in soil acidity, he was able to delineate the outline of a roughly 20-foot-wide prehistoric pit house cut into sandy, shell-laden deposits (Evans, Grossman, and Tomey 1968).
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Fig. B.1-1. Joel W. Grossman (right, in hat) as Crew Chief directing the 1967 excavation of a 7,000 BP prehistoric pit house at the Puente Rincón site (SBA-1), overlooking the Santa Barbara coast, Carpinteria, California. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
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4. Early Summer 1968 — Field Training under Dr. Christopher Donnan: Excavation of the Pre-Inca Desert Temple Site of Huaca Facho, Lambayeque Valley, Peru. In 1968, during his first year as a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, Dr. John H. Rowe — the leading expert in Inca and pre-Inca archaeology in the United States — arranged for Grossman to serve as summer intern under Dr. Christopher Donnan, the renowned expert in the archaeology and iconography of early pre-Inca Moche culture. Under Dr. Donnan’s direction, Grossman was taken to the Lambayeque Valley on the northern coastal desert of Peru to record surviving polychrome murals exposed by looters at the large, heavily looted pre-Inca temple mound of Huaca Facho.
While Dr. Donnan recorded polychrome murals exposed in a series of inset façade niches, Grossman surveyed the surrounding site, recovering from the backfill of one looted tomb a substantial assemblage of looter-rejected ceramic press-molds used in antiquity for the manufacture of face-neck jars — one of the largest such caches documented in Andean archaeology. He used those molds to reconstruct positive models and was invited to publish his first Andean report in 1969 in the prestigious Andean archaeology journal ‘Ñawpa Pacha’ (“Ancient Times” in Quechua), published by Berkeley’s Institute of Andean Studies (Grossman 1969–1970).
Figures A-1–A-2: Field Training under Dr. Christopher Donnan — Huaca Facho, Lambayeque Valley, Peru (1968)
Fig. A-1. Dr. Chris Donnan and Joel W. Grossman resting beside their
expedition jeep, “Clementine,” at the late pre-Inca temple mound of
Huaca Facho, Lambayeque Valley, Peru. Summer 1968. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman,
Ph.D. 1968. |
Fig. A-2. Dr. Chris Donnan recording the inset polychrome pre-Inca murals at Huaca Facho, Lambayeque Valley, Peru. Summer 1968. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. 1968. All Rights Reserved. |
5. Late Summer 1968 — Field Survey and Surface Collection at Huari, Ayacucho: Pre-Inca Capital of the Middle Horizon Wari Empire (600–1000 AD).
After completing fieldwork at Huaca Facho, Grossman spent six weeks in Cuzco — the base of operations for UC Berkeley Andean archaeologists — acclimatizing to the 11,000–13,000 ft. elevations of his upcoming study area. He then traveled alone to the central Andean city of Ayacucho, home of the pre-Inca Wari capital at the site of Huari (ca. 600–1000 AD), to conduct field survey and surface collection of ceramic sherds. While surveying the capital site, he recovered a small but important sample of brightly decorated Wari ceramics belonging to what proved to be the previously unrecorded earliest phase of the Wari culture — identified by Dr. Dorothy Menzel, one of his lead PhD supervisors at Berkeley and the university’s leading expert in Middle Horizon Wari culture, as unique examples of the Chakipampa Phase 1A style, dating to ca. 600 AD.
Upon his return to Berkeley, with the continued support of his Ford Foundation and NSF funding, Grossman spent a semester in the Lowie Museum collection laboratory reconstructing the ceramic forms and decorative elements of this earliest phase of the Wari style, working under Dr. Menzel’s supervision and with the assistance of ceramic specialist and collections director Larry Dawson. His resulting graduate paper on the finds, submitted for Dr. Rowe’s Anthropology 220C seminar, received high marks (Grossman 1968).
Following his fieldwork at Huari, Grossman spent the balance of that summer conducting a valley-wide site survey for pre-Inca settlements throughout the Chumbao Valley, Andahuaylas, laying important groundwork for his later selection of the Waywaka site for the controlled excavation that would follow in 1970–1971.
6. Summers 1968 and 1969 — Residence in Cuzco with Dr. John H. Rowe’s Team: Pre-Expedition Acclimatization and Planning for Highland Andean Fieldwork.
In both the early summer of 1968 and the early summer of 1969, Dr. Grossman spent extended periods in Cuzco — the historic Inca capital and the base of operations for UC Berkeley’s Andean archaeological programs — under the direction of Dr. John H. Rowe, Director of Berkeley’s Institute of Andean Studies and the leading authority on Inca and pre-Inca archaeology in the United States. These residencies served the dual purpose of physiological acclimatization to the 11,000–13,000 ft. elevations of the south-central Andean study area and logistical planning for the upcoming field expeditions to Pampachiri (1969) and Waywaka (1970–1971). In Cuzco, Grossman worked alongside Dr. Rowe’s team, acquainting himself with Inca architecture, ceramic chronology, and the documentary record of the south-central highlands that would inform his subsequent excavations.
Figures B-1–B-6: Cuzco Residence and Pre-Expedition Preparation with Dr. John H. Rowe (Summers 1968–1969)
Fig. B-1. Joel W. Grossman (Ph.D. candidate) in the field with UC Berkeley professor Dr. John H. Rowe, archaeologist Dr. Patricia Lyons, and fellow graduate student Edward Dwyer, at the pre-Inca site of Minas Pata, outside Cuzco. Photo by Dr. Jane Dwyer, UC Berkeley. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. B-2. Joel W. Grossman sliding down the Inca “slides” carved into the crest of the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuamán, overlooking Cuzco. Summer 1969. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. 1969. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. B-3. Joel W. Grossman “holding up” the main gate of the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuamán, overlooking Cuzco. Summer 1969. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. 1969. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. B-4. Dr. Grossman with Chumbao Valley villagers who guided him back to Andahuaylas after he became lost following an Inca llama caravan across mountaintop trails, shown with the small Andean pack horses used in his archaeological surveys at 12,000–13,000 ft. elevation. 1970–71. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. B-5. An Inca llama caravan crossing the Andahuaylas highlands on ancient mountaintop trails. Andahuaylas, 1970. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. 1970. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. B-6. A procession of Andahuaylas neighbors — local Quechua women in brightly dyed multi-layered wool skirts heading to church on a rainy morning, walking past Dr. Grossman’s living and laboratory compound on the main street of Andahuaylas. 1969–71. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
7. 1969 — Recording of a Rare Pre-Inca Textile-Wrapped Mummy Bundle, Pampachiri, Andahuaylas.
In 1969, supported by Ford and NSF grants administered through Berkeley’s Institute of Andean Studies, Dr. Rowe and his University of Cuzco colleague Dr. Oscar Nuñez del Prado — whose collaborative survey work in the south-central Andes dated back to 1954 (Rowe 1956) — launched an international joint UC Berkeley–University of Cuzco expedition into the south-central Andes of Apurímac to locate and record reported mummy bundle remains. The expedition was co-directed by Joel W. Grossman (UC Berkeley), who was appointed to co-direct together with a team of six Peruvian archaeologists from Cuzco, led by Dr. Luis (“Lucho”) Barreda Murillo (University of Cuzco), with three mandates: (1) to record new archaeological sites, (2) conduct surface collection in search of new pre-Inca ceramic styles, and (3) document any surviving elements of a reported brightly colored polychrome mummy bundle — objects commonly preserved in coastal desert sands but rarely encountered in the Andean highlands.
The joint UC Berkeley–University of Cuzco team traveled to Pampachiri by way of passes above 13,000 feet. The team successfully documented and photographed surviving fragments of the mummy bundle textiles, which had been preserved and stored in the town’s high school. All surviving textile elements were recorded and photographed. Dr. Grossman obtained a radiocarbon date of 1228 cal AD (UCLA 1497A) from one fragment. Surface collections at two well-preserved pre-Inca settlements, known locally as Chichaqasa (Ap2-19) and Ch’naqota (Ay 5-2), also yielded twelve finely made prismatic blades of basalt and chalcedony, interpreted as inserts for U-shaped sickles or scythes for harvesting quinoa and maize, as illustrated by the early seventeenth-century chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala (Grossman 1971).
The residents of Pampachiri honored the arrival of the archaeological team with a delicious feast of roasted piglet and a diverse array of indigenous Andean potatoes and local greens. They then staged the rarely documented indigenous “bullfight” known as the Corrida de Cóndor — also called the Yawar Fiesta (“Blood Festival”) or Tupupuklllay (“Game of the Bull”) — in which a living condor, captured using fermented meat and strapped to a bull’s back with wooden spikes and leather cords, is pitted against the bull in a ritual symbolizing the enduring struggle between Andean indigenous culture and the Spanish colonial legacy. The condor, if it survives, is released as a positive omen for the coming year. Dr. Grossman’s photographic record of the event is among the few such documentations in Andean archaeology and ethnography; the ceremony was not observed again by outsiders until 1980–1981, when Cornell University archaeologist Monica Barnes witnessed a comparable event, later published without photographs in 1994 (Barnes 1994, 13–18).
Figures C-1–C-13: Pampachiri, Ch’naqota, and the Yawar
Fiesta,
Andahuaylas (1969)
Fig. C-1. Joint University of Cuzco – University of California, Berkeley 1969 Expedition members at 14,170 ft. elevation en route from Cuzco to Pampachiri. Left to right: Expedition Driver; Joel W. Grossman, UC Berkeley Co-Director; Dr. Luis Barreda Murillo, Co-Director, University of Cuzco; Juan Núñez del Prado; and Marco of the University of Cuzco. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. 1969. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. C-2. View of the upland Andean Puna at the high point (10,500–14,500 ft.) of the joint UC Berkeley–UC Cuzco expedition en route to Pampachiri — the high-altitude habitat of Quechua pastoralism, tuber agriculture, wild and domesticated camelids, the viscacha, Andean fox, and condor. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. 1969. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-3. Panoramic view of the Pampachiri valley, Department of Apurímac, separated by a river from the adjacent Department of Ayacucho. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. 1969. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-4. Google Earth overhead view of the town of Pampachiri, showing its organic, non-grid layout — postulated by Dr. John H. Rowe (1967) to share the Andean puma-shaped plan of the Inca capital Cuzco. © 2016 Digital Globe / Google Earth. |
Fig. C-5. Field survey photograph of the pre-Inca village site of Ch’naqota (Ay5-2), showing terraced fields and cobble-walled camelid pens bordering the Soros River. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. 1969. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-6. Indigenous Quechua ladies preparing a village-wide feast of suckling piglet, local grain quinoa, and multi-colored indigenous potatoes to celebrate the visiting archaeologists’ arrival. Pampachiri, 1969. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-7. Street vendor’s display of named multicolored Quechua potato varieties from different highland Andean altitude zones, each labeled with its variety name and grower. Andahuaylas, 1969–71. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-8. Brightly dressed Pampachiri townspeople watching the Yawar Fiesta (Corrida de Toros) from a highpoint overlooking the bullring. Pampachiri, 1969. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-9. Yawar Fiesta, Pampachiri 1969: Two men capture the highland Andean condor — with a ten-foot wingspan — after making it lethargic with rancid meat bait. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-10. Yawar Fiesta, Pampachiri 1969: Two men lead the “drunken” condor to the bullring, where it is to be strapped onto the bull’s back with wooden spikes and leather cords. Note the bullwhip used to control the bird. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-11. Yawar Fiesta, Pampachiri 1969: The condor — representing the Quechua Indian — strapped to the bull representing the Spaniard. The condor was customarily released and survived; the bull was slaughtered. See Barnes (1994) for the most authoritative account of this ten-day festival. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-12. Woven fragment of a “winged attendant” (to the Staff God) holding a staff, also referred to as the “sacrificer figure” (Berg 2017: Figure 3), or as Menzel called it, a “Feline-headed Angel” (Menzel 1977: 112; Figure 67) in profile with its design elements of head, staff, headdress, wing, foot and leg clearly definable (Figure 19). Cook uses the religiously more neutral designation of “Profile Attendants” (1984–1985: Ft. Note 1: 71). The textile of the winged attendant was found with remnants of one or more mummy bundles in Pampachiri (60 km southwest of Andahuaylas), in Apurímac, during a joint 1969 University of Cuzco and University of California expedition. A traditional non-AMS radiocarbon determination on one of the textile fragments from a possibly unassociated textile mummy bundle yielded a calibrated date (UCLA-1497A) with a median probability of 1,228 cal A.D. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-13. Woven fragment of a “winged attendant” (to the Staff God) holding a staff, also referred to as the “sacrificer figure” (Berg 2017: Figure 3), or as Menzel called it, a “Feline-headed Angel” (Menzel 1977: 112; Figure 67). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
8. 1970–1971 — Discovery of the Origins of New World Metallurgy, Waywaka, Andahuaylas, Apurímac, Peru.
Supported by a United States Department of State Fulbright Doctoral Fellowship and the UC Berkeley Special Career Fellowship (Dean’s Office, Berkeley campus, University of California, Berkeley), Dr. Grossman directed a one-year controlled excavation (1970–1971) at the site of Waywaka — an 11,000-ft. ridge-top site overlooking the colonial city of Andahuaylas, originally recorded by Rowe and Nuñez del Prado in their 1954 survey of the region (Rowe 1956). Selected on the advice of Dr. Rowe, who counseled against sites with extensive architecture that might produce deep intrusive disturbances, Waywaka offered an undisturbed naturally stratified sequence ideal for reconstructing a pre-Inca chronology for the south-central highlands. The excavation was carried out with a small Peruvian field crew, including Roque Cisneros, whose skilled and dedicated assistance throughout the 1970–1971 fieldwork was critical to the success of the excavation program.
Excavation revealed a deeply stratified two-meter-deep sequence of culturally distinct pre-Inca deposits spanning approximately 3,500 years. The lowest layers — the Muyu Moqo phase, named after the site where it was first identified — yielded the oldest known evidence of gold metallurgy in the New World: a gold-worker’s tool kit consisting of two nested oval pumice bowls, three finely ground cylindrical hammer stones, a carefully polished mushroom-shaped stone anvil, and gold foil flakes, all recovered on sterile bedrock in association with fifteen tightly flexed human burials — members of the 3,500-year-old Initial Period Muyu Moqo, early ceramic-making culture, for whom Dr. Grossman was able to document the age, sex and pathology of the hill-top burials in Waywaka. hammered gold foil, approximately 4 cm in length and bent through the perforation of a blue stone bead, was recovered from the mouth of Burial No. 4. Subsequent fine-screen water-sieving of adjacent midden levels recovered 53 additional gold foil flakes and 58 blue stone beads. The gold foil evidence pushed the origins of New World metallurgy back approximately one thousand years before the previously accepted Chavín horizon date of ca. 800 BC — to approximately 1,500 cal BC (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983).
Overlying the Muyu Moqo deposits were two more recent ceramic phases: the Qasawirka style — a finely burnished red-slipped pottery found in a compact near-surface layer containing double-faced stone walls, a cobble-lined cistern, and aligned rectilinear structures — and a surface ploughzone layer of mixed later ceramics. Six new high-resolution AMS radiocarbon determinations by the Keck Carbon Cycle AMS Facility at UC Irvine now fix the Qasawirka occupation at 685–887 cal AD, a 200-year span (Grossman, in press).
Dr. Grossman’s original 1,500 cal BC dating for the gold finds was disputed by several Andean archaeologists, who published opinions — without new evidence — asserting the gold dated to no more than 1,000 BC (Shimada 1994; Bray 1998–1999; Aldenderfer 2008). Five subsequent high-resolution AMS radiocarbon determinations, computed as a weighted average by Beta Analytic, confirmed Dr. Grossman’s original dating without qualification. In 2021, Roberto Lleras — former Director of the Colombian Gold Museum in Bogotá — invited Dr. Grossman to present his most current AMS dating evidence before Peru’s VIII National Congress of Archaeology, hosted by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture in Lima (August 16–22, 2021), a high-profile government-sponsored venue that provided a strong international rebuttal to five decades of critical commentary. The paper was simultaneously broadcast on Lima’s television Channel 24 and published in Spanish in the 2022 Congress Proceedings (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 2013, 2021, 2022a).
Figures D-1–D-27: The Waywaka Excavation — New World Metallurgy, Andahuaylas, Apurímac, Peru (1970–1971)
Fig. D-1. Photography by Dr. Grossman from the airplane window while flying over the 21,000-plus peaks of the high Andes. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-2. View from the high ground of the Valley of Chumbao, the home of the Andean city of Andahuaylas, in a morning photograph showing the valley bottom obscured by thick clouds, obscuring the center of Spanish/Mestizo occupations in the valley bottom daily. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-3. Late-morning view of the lush valley-bottom Chumbao basin, free of cloud cover, covered by agricultural fields. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-4. Google Earth perspective view looking north of the hill-top site of Waywaka (3040m) overlooking the city of Andahuaylas, in the valley of Chumbao, Apurímac, Peru. Note 2016 two-lane road cut, graded 5-10m into the flanges of Waywaka (L. Kellett 2021, personal comm. 11-3-2021). The road cut destroyed what had been shown through archaeological testing (Grossman 1972b; 1983, 2022a) to be exclusively Early Intermediate Period/Middle Horizon deposits belonging to the later Qasawirka occupation covering most of the entire site and now bounded by the new road cut. The earlier deeply buried Initial Period Muyu Moqo settlement was restricted to the oval area of deeply buried deposits at the crest of the hill, which did not appear to have been affected by road construction (Photo: Google). |
Fig. D-5. Field view of two of the three-person project team on the first day of excavation on the highest point of the crest of Waywaka. The initial 1 x 2-meter stratigraphic control unit (Unit C: W27-N0), on the crest of Waywaka. In the foreground, working the rocker-screen, is archaeologist Laurie Levin of U.C. Berkeley and Harvard. In the rear is Roque, a Quechua-speaking resident of the Chumbao valley, a skilled mechanic by training, and a former paratrooper, who, after 15 months in the field, became an accomplished excavator and archaeological associate. Together they undertook most of the delicate excavation, laboratory data processing, and water screening to recover ancient plant remains from the early deposits, work needed to expose and record the well-defined, vertically superimposed stratigraphic record, the fifteen human burials, gold foil, and gold worker’s tool kit, encountered in the lowest Muyu Moqo levels of the excavation. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-6. Dr. Joel W. Grossman using one of several locally-built rocker-screens to recover ceramic, stone (lithic), bone, and metal artifacts at the outset of the excavation. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-7. Perspective view of the first 1x2 meter strata control unit, Unit C (W27N0), showing what turned out to be a naturally stratified sequence of 35 centuries of pre-Inca occupations. In the bottom-most deposits, and resting on bedrock, are three of the fifteen early Initial Period human burials, Burials 4, 5 and 6, now firmly dated to 1,500 cal B.C. (From Grossman 1972b; 2013: Figure 5) Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-8. Four-meter-long profile of two adjacent 1x2 meter units, Unit C (W27N0) and Unit G (W29N0), showing at least ten distinct deposits of naturally stratified occupation deposits and sandy fill layers within the ca. 170 cm. deep site of Waywaka. Note the stratigraphic position of the early Middle Horizon Qasawirka deposit (Level II), of predominantly adobe melt, over naturally stratified, but friable, Initial Period Muyu Moqo style occupations below, which defined the three-phase (Phase A, B and C-D) sequence of the Muyu Moqo style (From Grossman 1983; Grossman 2013: Figure 2; Grossman 2022a). © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. D-9. Field view of Roque, Dr. Grossman’s lead archaeological field assistant, shown excavating the interior fill of an oval subsurface cobble-lined cistern for the collection of rain and runoff water on the crest of Waywaka (Structure 3, Feature Unit F). The artifact-rich fill of the cistern yielded 14,433 sherds of Qasawirka pottery, 1,353 pieces of bone, 521 basalt tools, and 18 fragments of obsidian. The upper and lower fill of the cistern yielded six high-integrity radiocarbon samples that dated the time range and median age of the site’s Qasawirka occupation. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-10. Candid photography of Dr. Grossman’s primary, and highly-skilled, archaeological field assistant, Roque Cisneros, standing in his family’s corn field with his little sister, who, as is custom in Quechua households, carried her infant sister in a sling on her back while their parents were out of their hut tending to the fields. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-11. During his 1970 – 1971 fieldwork in the Andean highlands of south-central Peru, Dr. Grossman was honored by being invited to share a meal with his field assistant Roque and his family in their small rectangular, ca. 12-foot diameter, cobblestone and “wattle and daub” thatch and mud composition, of woven branches, filled in with mud plaster, with a thatched roof and a communal fireplace in the center of the hut. Both Roque’s family, and Dr Grossman, sat on the ground in a circle with their feet near the fire in a circle, while one of the family’s chef sources of meat, guinea pigs (known as qowi in Quechua) ran freely underfoot, until they were picked, and pithed (killed by pressure to the neck), generally by the children, for dinner. In addition to the barbequed quwi meat, we were served corn on the cob (Choclo), and quinoa — a robust and much-appreciated meal shared by Roque’s family, in their hut located amongst cornfields on the upper slopes of the Chumbao valley, overlooking the city of Andahuaylas below. Photos by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-12. Plan view of hollow early Middle Horizon Qasawirka style figurine found and recovered by schoolboys from the type-site of Qasawirka (Ap2-1) in the Chumbao valley of Andahuaylas. Note sculpted facial features (nose, eyes, eyebrows, and ears) and molded hands and feet, versus being mold-made, as was common for the later Late Intermediate Period mold-impressed figurines (Grossman 1969-1970). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-13. Macro photograph of Qasawirka style figurine fragment of a face found as a surface find from an unnamed Qasawirka style site with the survey designation of Ap2-26 in Andahuaylas. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-14. Frontal view of sculpted face-neck jar fragment characteristic of the Qasawirka style pottery recovered as a surface find from the type-site of Qasawirka (Ap2-1). Note carefully proportioned and sculpted facial features and minimalist use of incisions for facial features. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-15. Photograph of early Middle Horizon plain (all consistently burnished with thick red slip) Qasawirka style sherds. Note neckless olla at the top and fragment of Qasawirka necked jar to the right. The lower left sherd derived from a small Qasawirka bowl. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-16. Macro photo of a rim sherd from the earliest Phase A deposits of the Muyu Moqo style. Note the characteristic Phase A flat beveled lip — as if a spatula had been used while the clay was still plastic. The body of the sherd had a thin, watery, reddish-brown wash and showed scraping, but not burnishing, below the rim on the shoulder of the vessel. In contrast, the subsequent Phase B of the Muyu Moqo style was distinguished by rounded lips and smooth burnishing over the body of the vessel (see Grossman 1983: 6). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-17. Rim sherd reconstructions of the earliest Phase A component of the Initial Period Muyu Moqo style showing the range of vessel forms, including a predominance of large neckless ollas, small neckless ollas, small open bowls, and bottle spouts. (From Grossman 1983:105, figuras 8-19; See Grossman 1983: Figure 6 for macro-photos of Muyu Moqo rims and lips, Muyu Moqo Phase A, B, and C-D). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-18. Photograph of the first human Muyu Moqo burial, Burial 4 — an adult male of around 35 years of age (there were also animal burials, Burials 1-3, including a severed human forearm, found in shallow intrusive pits in the sandy matrix of the uppermost Phase C-D deposits). The thirty-five-hundred-year-old male was found in a fetal position without ceramic associations. However, careful excavation and exposure of his skull revealed the undisturbed in situ presence, in his mandible, of a large blue-stone bead, and with it, a tube-like segment of 3.5 cm long hammered and rolled gold foil, wedged through the perforation in the bead. (From Grossman 1972b; 1983, fig. 7; Grossman 2022a). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-19. Close-up view of eight blue stone beads found in association with the first human burial, Burial 4. The large stone bead in the upper right, shown with a 3.5 cm length of gold foil found wedged through the hole in the bead, was recovered in association with the mandible of the burial, a male of about 35 years of age. (From Grossman 1972b; Grossman 1972a:272; Grossman 2013, Grossman 2022a) Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-20. Initial view of the two stone bowls of the gold worker’s tool kit as encountered, sitting on sterile bedrock, on the last day of the excavation of the second 1x2 meter Unit G (W29-N0). Note raindrops on artifacts; a thunderstorm precluded taking color photographs. The tool kit was found in the lowest level of Unit G (G-IX), associated with gold foil and ceramics of the lowest Phase A deposits of the early Initial Period Muyu Moqo style (From Grossman 1972b). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-21. Field photo, taken during a thunderstorm (which precluded low-light color photography), on the last day of excavation at Waywaka, with the top “cheqo” bowl set to the side of the artifact-filled bottom bowl, showing the interior association of three gold-working tools — a finely formed mushroom-shaped anvil and three cylindrical hammer stones. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-22. Field-laboratory photo of the two stone bowls with the top bowl found inverted over the bottom bowl. Both bowls were carved out of soft white volcanic tuff, known locally as “cheqo” (After Grossman 1972: 274). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-23. Field laboratory photograph of the anvil and three cylindrical hammer stones found inside the two bowls recovered in association with the earliest Muyu Moqo Phase A deposits in Unit G (W29-N0). a) Anvil, length 10.1 cm, weight 359.5 gm; b) Hammer: length 5.8 cm, weight 102 gm; c) Hammer: length 4.0 cm, weight 65.5 gm; d) Hammer: length 4.5 cm, weight 58.5 gm. (After Grossman 1972:275; Grossman 2022a Fig. 3). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-26. Schematic showing settlement size expansion at Waywaka from the Initial Period to the Early Intermediate Period and based n new AMS dating, into the Middle Horizon (600 AD. – 1000AD), the four- hundred- yearlong, three phases (Phase A, B and CD) of Muyu Moqo occupation (1,100–1,500 cal B.C.). Together, the three phases were restricted to a ca. 150-square-meter oval-shaped occupation area centered on the high point of the hilltop site of Waywaka. In contrast, the subsequent, ca. a two hundred year long, overlying near-surface, Qasawirka occupation deposits (680- to 860 cal AD) expanded to roughly 650 square meters, or. Ca a 400% increase in area between the two superimposed pre-Inca settlements (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 1993, 2022a; Grossman et. al, 2020, 2021) (After Grossman 1983, p.101, Fig.3) © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. D-27. Quantified bone density showed significant shifts through time (1,500 cal BC – 860cal AD), in tandem with major increases (400%) in settlement size (See Fig.26) the multicomponent mountaintop series of overlying settlements, was a showed parallel, and order of magnitude, increase in the density of faunal remains between the Initial Period and the Middle Horizon. The density of Camelid bone density between the three earliest Initial Period phases (Muyu Moqo Phase A and Phase B and Phase Muyu Moqo C-D), ranged between a low-density range of between 100 to 200 bones per cubic meter. In contrast, the density of camelid fauna in the combined Qasawirka deposits and features (including the hilltop Feature 3, cobble-lined Qasawirka cistern fill) showed a major, order-of-magnitude jump in concentration of camelid bones of between 100 to 600 camelid bones per cubic meter, or a 300% increase over that of the earlier Muyu Moqo sample (After Grossman1983, p 74, Graph 1).
Fig. D-28. Schematic reconstructiion of pre-Inca Andean ecological zonnes as defined by John Murra in his ethnohistorically-based reconstruction of for Inca and pre-Inca non-marked “Verticality” model of elevation-dependent agricultural and hotricultural (llama, alpaca)raising zones of production, illustrating the central placement of the Waywaka settlement half way beetween the upper “jalka”production zone in the puna above 3,600 meters, and above the lower, valley-bottom “Kichwa” zone of agricultural production in the valley bottom, below 3100 meters eleation. (after Grossman 1983, p72, Diagram 1).
Fig. D-29. Revised chronological chart for Andahuaylas showing age ranges for the two major occupations from the crest of Waywaka: the Initial Period Muyu Moqo occupation, dated to 1,500 cal B.C.; and the Middle Horizon Qasawirka occupation, now firmly dated across a 189-year range spanning 683–872 cal A.D., based on six radiocarbon determinations. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. D-24. Hand-drawn sketch of how the hammers and anvil may have been used together, with the mushroom-shaped “anvil” held between the craftsman’s knees to hammer the gold foil. Hand-drawn reconstruction by Father Albert Stankard of the Saint James Society (after Grossman 1972a:275). © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. D-25. Exploding pie chart documenting the relative number of diagnostic sherds from each ceramic style group recovered from the Waywaka excavations. The Qasawirka sample yielded 1,817 diagnostic sherds; the Muyu Moqo Phase C-D ceramics yielded a smaller sample of 402 diagnostic sherds; and the earliest Muyu Moqo Phase A sample was limited to just 177 diagnostic sherds out of the total collection. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Waywaka — Las fechas AMS finales para la Fase A de Muyu Moqo: Cerámica y oro. Video presentation by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D., to the Simposio Temático sobre Arqueometalurgia Sudamericana, VIII Congreso Nacional de Arqueología del Perú, Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, 16–21 August 2021 (Grossman 2021a); the paper was subsequently published by the Ministerio de Cultura in the Actas (Grossman 2022a; see Doc. 15). In Spanish, approx. 19 minutes.
If the video does not start, click here to open it in a new window.
Fig. D-30. Video of Dr. Grossman’s 2021 presentation (Grossman 2021a) to the Peruvian Ministry of Culture’s VIII Congreso Nacional de Arqueología, presenting the final AMS radiocarbon dates for Muyu Moqo Phase A ceramics and the associated hammered gold foil and goldworker’s toolkit from Waywaka, Andahuaylas, Peru. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
9. 1982 — United Nations (UNESCO) Field Training Program in Advanced Archaeological Technologies: Lima, Cuzco, and Ayacucho — Under UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello Auspices.
In 1982, Dr. Grossman served as Peru’s first United Nations Visiting Scientist, appointed under the UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello Fund International Training Program under a two-part mandate: first, to train Peruvian government archaeologists in advanced applied technology for archaeological site definition and documentation; and second, to test the utility of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) at twelve Inca and colonial urban sites selected by the Peruvian government, throughout coastal and highland Peru — in Lima, Cuzco, and Ayacucho — the latter conducted during the height of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla insurgency.
The fieldwork phase of the 1982 Visiting Scholar program — described in full in Section D.1 — took Dr. Grossman throughout the coast and highland cities of Lima, Cuzco, and Ayacucho, training senior INC archaeologists in applied technology field methods and testing GPR at twelve government-selected Inca and colonial sites. The program was conducted during a period of extreme political violence caused by the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla insurgency in the Andean highlands.
In Ayacucho, the dangers of the insurgency were immediate and personal. Dr. Grossman’s host — Dr. Walter Wong, Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Ayacucho — was killed during this period of extreme political violence. Dr. Grossman himself was targeted for kidnapping by Sendero Luminoso as a foreign UN scientist working in the war-torn region. He was warned of the plot, and cautioned against traveling outside the city to the Sendero-controlled Quechua village of Quero, by Enrique Bragairac Dávila, a senior Peruvian archaeologist then serving as Director of Excavations at the ca. 800 AD D-shaped Huari building in the Vegachayoq Moqo sector — a site Dr. Grossman had been invited to visit during his UNESCO mission. Dr. Bragairac’s warning, delivered along with cautions to Dr. Grossman’s Peruvian government escorts, is credited with having averted a potentially grave outcome. Some Peruvian officials and archaeologists later speculated that Dr. Grossman’s status as a United Nations scientist may itself have contributed to his safety during this dangerous final phase of the training and technology-testing mission. These circumstances added profound logistical and personal complexity to the completion of the training program and GPR field tests in the southern highlands (Grossman et al. 1983, 2020).
10. 1989–2004 — U.S. and State Government Emergency Archaeological Mitigations. Following his return from Peru in 1982, Dr. Grossman directed a sustained series of U.S. and State government emergency archaeological programs, including federally mandated EPA and Army Corps of Engineers work stoppages, Superfund HAZMAT site investigations, and major urban rescue excavations throughout the northeastern United States (1989–2004). These programs are described in detail in Sections C, E, and the Appendix G case studies.
10. 1992 — Invited U.S. State Department “People-to-People” Scientific Delegation to Russia in 1992, the U.S. Department of State invited Dr. Grossman to join the first American scientific delegation to Russia in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, organized under the State Department’s “People-to-People” bilateral scientific exchange program. The composition of the delegation was striking: half its members were nuclear missile engineers, and half were American archaeologists — a pairing reflecting the dual priorities of early post-Soviet scientific diplomacy.
Upon arriving in Moscow, Dr. Grossman was invited to present a conference paper before the Russian Institute of Archaeology, introducing Russian colleagues to a suite of applied-technology strategies he had developed and deployed over the preceding decade to resolve two categories of costly federal emergency work stoppages due to 1) unexpected “discoveries under construction” that triggered work stoppages on major government infrastructure programs, and 2), the first U.S. government-mandated HAZMAT archaeological investigations of highly contaminated Superfund cleanup sites in the eastern United States and Puerto Rico.
The applied-technology systems Dr. Grossman introduced to the Russian Institute of Archaeology included: targeted, vs blind “random sampling” excavation strategies which included ,” Historic-GIS”, a name coined by Dr. Grossman, for site discovery and targeting in difficult and dangerous settings a technique that integrated georeferenced 18th- and 19th-century historic maps, locked to satellite coordinates to facilitate non-random, subsurface targeting of buried remains; advanced terrestrial geophysics —including ground-penetrating radar (GPR) as well as non-contact electromagnetic conductivity, and magnetic systems — real-time 3D computerized data control using first-generation electronic transits, and total stations integrated with portable data collectors to provide real-time on-site data processing and feedback; a new generation of single-camera photogrammetry adapted from the Rollei Corporation’s joint-venture methods with German intelligence to record and decipher the frequencies of enemy antennas which enabled precise, non-contact, 3D and stereo documentation under the restricted confines of deep-winter field shelters and in proximity with toxic and/or hazardous materials, initiated at the onset of the Superfund remediation program in 1989.
One of the central benchmarks in technology introduce by Dr. Grossman, consisted of the integration of concurrent, on-site, conservation staff and laboratory facilities at project excavation sites which generally took place under fixed blast-proof winter shelters with limited mobility, coupled with the deployment of safe Superfund-HAZMAT archaeological protection and decontamination protocols beginning in 1989 till 1997,for the deployment of the first U.S. government-mandated fully HAZMAT-certified archaeologists for the investigation of contaminated archaeological sites containing dangerous and toxic substances, which included cadmium, arsenic, PCBs, unexploded Civil War ordnance, and low-level radiation. Following the Moscow symposium in 1992, Dr. Grossman’s Russian hosts flew the full archaeological delegation by helicopter throughout the Caucasus of southern Russia, visiting large circular cut-stone Scythian tombs — renowned for their ancient Greek armor and artifacts — and well-preserved Viking settlements with intact sod-covered wooden structures and spiked defensive palisades (Grossman et al. 1992, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c; Holzer 1996).
12. 1993 — Invited Return to Russia, Under Russian Sponsorship: Second International Conference on Eurasian Roads, Stavropol
As described above, Dr. Grossman’s initial 1992 State Department-funded visit introduced Russian colleagues at the Institute of Archaeology to a suite of applied geospatial and remote-sensing technologies. This second visit, in 1993, was initiated, coordinated, and funded entirely by his Russian archaeological colleagues, who invited him to return as their Visiting Scientist before the Second International Conference on Contacts and Interactions on Eurasian Roads in Ancient and Medieval Times, held in Stavropol, Russia, September 19–25, 1993.
Upon his arrival, Dr. Grossman found that his Russian hosts had systematically adopted and integrated into their own field and laboratory programs most of the applied-technology systems Dr. Grossman had introduced to his Russian counterparts the previous year. These adopted technologies included: 1) air-photo analysis and Historic-GIS for non-random targeting of complex urban sites, Scythian tombs and Viking settlements; 2) the deployment of terrestrial geophysics for targeted pre-excavation mapping; 3) 3D computer transits, measurement, and recording systems for real-time, georeferenced geospatial documentation; 4) use of overhead stereo and single-camera photogrammetry; 5) concurrent on-site computerized artifact inventory, stabilization, and conservation laboratories for real-time quantified 3D data control; and 6) all-weather environmental control systems to facilitate winter excavations, so as to avoid construction delays in fair weather.
The speed and completeness of this adoption of Dr. Grossman’s advanced technologies, within a single year, served as direct confirmation of the practical utility and transferability of the applied-technology protocols Dr. Grossman had developed over two decades of U.S. federal emergency and Superfund programs. During this visit, Dr. Grossman also held working seminars for senior Russian project directors to introduce post-Soviet cannons of Western budget control and fiscal management, offerings with no equivalent project management models in Soviet-era field direction and planning.; Dr. Grossman explained the Western practice of building overhead into project budgets to support proposal development and non-project-specific operational expenses — an institutional and managerial transfer distinct from, but parallel to, the applied-technology transfer described above.
Finally, after having learned of Dr. Grossman’s twelve years of research as an high-altitude Pre-Inca Andean archaeologist- and of his 1982 UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello mission to train Peruvian archaeologists in applied geophysical methods in the Andes - his Russian hosts requested that he focus his invited lecture on a comparative, Peruvian/Russian question on human adaptations to the environments of both regions. Specifically, were interested in hearing about how did the archaeological and archival record of Inca and Pre-Inca Andean economic adaptations compare with those of the upper elevation intermountain valley settlements of the Caucasus? The resulting 1993 paper — the first such scientific presentation by an American archaeologist before a Russian scientific audience following the fall of the Soviet Union — compared the non-market, self-sufficient “verticality” economic systems of highland Pre-Inca Peru, first conceived by John Murra from colonial and ethnohistoric records, and documented archaeologically by Dr. Grossman in his excavations at Waywaka, Andahuaylas, with the ecological and cultural organization of the Scythian occupations of the Caucasus intermountain valleys — drawing on parallels in topography, altitude-zoned agricultural production, and regionally isolated community self-sufficiency (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1981, 1993).
Unfortunately, the 1993 visit was cut short by events little known in the West: an attempted military coup by units of the Russian Army’s Southern Command seeking to wrest control from Moscow’s central command. The revolt was suppressed, but the situation grew acutely dangerous for Dr. Grossman as a foreign visiting scientist; throughout the night, he was kept awake by the rumble of heavy tanks and armored personnel carriers outside his hotel window passing beneath his hotel window in Stavropol. His Russian hosts evacuated him, by air, to Moscow, from which he departed Russia on a U.S. State Department-chartered flight to New York, ill upon departure — his Russian colleagues threw him a bottle of much-needed antibiotics over the airport security fence, and an American flight attendant who recognized him from earlier flights arranged his return in first class.
13. 1994–1995 — Invited Appointment, U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) Policy Working Group, Virginia. In 1994–1995, Dr. Grossman was invited — through a U.S. State Department referral — to join a federal policy working group convened by the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), meeting at a federally owned retreat in the Virginia countryside, to help set national standards and guidelines for historic preservation and archaeology. His central contribution was advocating for real-time, 3D computerized data-control and on-site conservation technologies as core elements of federal government mandates, guidelines and funding priorities for United States archaeological research — an advanced-technology-based position that met resistance from a number of the university-based academic scholars also serving on the panel, reflecting a broader disciplinary divide at the time between traditional academic archaeology and emerging applied/geospatial technology approaches.
14. 1996–1997 — Executive Branch Appointment: Advisory Council on Historic Preservation; U.S. Army Aberdeen Proving Ground Applied Technology Protocols. In 1996–1997, Dr. Grossman was recruited by the Executive Branch unit of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) — the federal body tasked with enforcement of White House Executive Orders on historic preservation — to travel to Washington, D.C., to lecture and train federal Department of the Interior and National Park Service archaeologists and historic preservation officers in his applied-technology methods for addressing two categories of high-stakes federal challenge: (1) the unexpected discovery of significant archaeological resources in the path of major federal infrastructure projects, and (2) the safe investigation of dangerous, highly contaminated archaeological sites under Superfund and related programs. While in Washington, ACHP staff directed Dr. Grossman to accept a contract from the U.S. Department of the Army’s Environmental Planning Division at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. His mandate encompassed two parallel deliverables: first, the development of strategic protocols for the safe and efficient Army-wide investigation of U.S. military archaeological sites; and second, the preparation of a series of emergency and Superfund case studies illustrating the full range of his applied-technology strategies. These included: non-random, target-specific geophysical site definition and targeting in dangerous military environments; real-time 3D data control systems; Historic-GIS — integrating historic maps with high-resolution satellite imagery to locate and target historic sites; and the deployment of highly trained conservation and artifact stabilization technologies. Six detailed case studies documented these systems as applied to U.S. Government work stoppages and to the safe investigation of dangerous, highly contaminated sites — including those requiring Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) protocols — in both civilian and military contexts (Grossman 1997, 2008a).
C. Federal and State-Mandated Urban Archaeological Work Stoppages and Emergency Programs (1977–2004)
The foundation for this two-decade program of applied-technology emergency archaeology, and Dr. Grossman’s development of a state-of the art applied technology-based archaeological wet-dry laboratory and robust field and laboratory staff, was established in 1976, at the urging of senior environmental planners in the NJDEP of the State of New Jersey. Dr. Grossman ‘s recruitment by Rutgers University to establish a robust archaeological field program was precipitated by Mr. Don Kreck, Director of the New Jersey State Division of Dam Safety, after he made a formal appeal to the Dean of Cook College at Rutgers University to establish a dedicated archaeological field and laboratory program with sufficient, funding, staffing and advanced-technology scientific capabilities to meet the planning and legal compliance needs of the state’s dam-safety design and environmental evaluation to serve as part of planning in a number of river drainages throughout New Jersey, including those of the Raritan, Monmouth, Passaic and Toms River drainage basins.
This state-sponsored initiative drew directly on Dr. Grossman’s successful planning and direction of high-altitude expeditions in the south-central highlands during his two season of advanced doctoral level training and his large-scale surveys, excavations and high-altitude fieldwork in the south-central highlands of Peru between 1968–1971 as a high-profile State Department Fulbright and UC Berkeley Special Career Fellow, backed by additional coverage by Ford Foundation and National Science Foundation supplemental grants. As a US Department of State-sponsored Fulbright Fellow, he award’s conditions of service included escorting the American ambassador’s daughter to Embassy evens.
While serving as the Fulbright program’s scientific mandates in Lima, so he was he became familiar with several Department of Interior and National Parks Service air photo specialists who were working with the Peruvian military to develop high resolution topo maps and 3D stereo photo pairs throughout the Peruvian Andes. In urgent need for aceturate maps to guide his forthcoming 18 month of high-altitude archaeological expeditions in the south-central highlands of Apurimac, Peru. His Embassy connections gave him an entrée to appeal to the American scientists and air photo mapping specialists to convince the Peruvian army to release their new aerial survey coverage of his study area. In addition to having 9 inch stereo pairs, he NSF and Ford Foundation summer field grants enabled him to blow up individual nine-inch frames into four by four foot photo enlargements to guide his field survey in the highlands between 12,000 and 14,000.
Central to this program, beginning at Raritan Landing, was Dr. Grossman’s integration of senior conservators from the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center and the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) directly into field management roles, rather than confining their expertise to post-excavation laboratory work. This reassignment of high-level conservation expertise to the field was revolutionary for its time, enabling real-time 3D data control, in-field artifact dating, and the definition of high-integrity stratigraphy under the compressed timeframes of emergency excavation. Working under the direction of these two conservators, Dr. Grossman implemented a computer-compatible database management system adapted from National Park Service artifact typologies. In addition, Dr.Grossman’s new archaeological laboratory at Cook College, he augmenteed his field and laboratory staff capabilities by recruiting a British-trained historical archaeologist who was expert in the deployment of a new computer-compatible stratigraphic recording and reconstruction with expertise developed and deployed in Britain and Europe known as the “Harris Matrix” digital stratigraphic recording system which was integrated into Grossman’s newly developed computer system by a British archaeologist, William Roberts, a specialist in the Harris Matrix’s application to complex, deeply stratified urban sites.
This work was further supported by extensive multi-agency collaboration with NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the U.S. Department of the Army — including radar specialists at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and later at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland — in the aerial and space-based linking of historic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps to modern satellite imagery, enabling the precise targeting of archaeological resources rather than reliance on “flying blind” random-sampling survey strategies. This applied-technology strategy, first developed at Raritan Landing, was carried forward through twelve years of federally mandated emergency work-stoppage response (1977–1989) and, subsequently, eight years of non-public, classified Superfund investigation (1989–1997).
Throughout this period, Dr. Grossman was personally and solely responsible for establishing and maintaining an extensive network of international scientific collaboration, including the Organization of American States (OAS), UNESCO, the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, Peru’s National Institute of Culture (INC) and Ministry of Culture, the Dutch Ministry of Culture, and the Russian Institute of Archaeology in Moscow, Stavropol, and throughout the southern Caucasus of southern Russia (1992–1993) — collaborations supported throughout by the U.S. Department of State (Fulbright), the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the UC Berkeley Special Career Fellowship (Grossman 1992, 1993; Grossman et al. 2019, 2020, 2021).
1. 1977–1982 — Raritan Landing, New Jersey: A Buried Colonial Port — EPA Work Stoppage.
See Section C-3 below for full description. This $100 million federal work stoppage under NEPA, directed by Dr. Grossman as Principal Investigator for Rutgers University’s Robeson Archaeological Survey Office (RASO), represented the first strategic deployment of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), 3D laser-IR transit survey, overhead stereo photogrammetry, and on-site real-time computerized artifact data control in U.S. urban archaeology (Grossman 1982, 2003, 2008a).
It was Dr. Grossman’s invited presentation of the Raritan Landing applied technology results at the 1981 OAS national directors conference in Quito, Ecuador (see C.2 below), that directly led to his selection as Peru’s first UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello International Visiting Scholar in 1982, as well as his appointment in 1992 to be a delegate as part of the US Department of State’s “People-to-People” international scientific exchange program..
2. 1981 — Invited Presentation, OAS Conference of National Directors of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, Quito, Ecuador.
Invited to present before all national directors of archaeology and historic preservation throughout Latin America at the Organization of American States (OAS) conference in Quito, Ecuador, Dr. Grossman delivered a major paper on his applied technology innovations at Raritan Landing. In the audience was Dr. Hugo Ludeña, Director of Peru’s Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC), who subsequently organized the multi-agency UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello initiative appointing Dr. Grossman as Peru’s 1982 International Visiting Scholar to train his senior Peruvian archaeologists in advanced field technologies and to test GPR at twelve Inca and colonial sites throughout the coast and highlands of Peru (see Section D.1).
3. 1983–1985 — Broad Financial Center / Pearl Street Excavation, Lower Manhattan.
See Section E-1 below for full description. Federally mandated LPC mitigation of the Dutch West India Company shoreline block (Grossman et al. 1985).
4. 1986–1990 — Fort Edward, New York: Second Federal Work Stoppage and Native American Burial Policy Resolution.
See Section C-4 below. Grossman and Associates, Inc. directed this third major mitigation project — and second federally mandated work stoppage — following the discovery of Native American burials and cultural remains. Resolving the stoppage required Dr. Grossman to help develop new federal policy addressing the cultural sensitivities of Native American descendant communities, including a high-level series of interagency federal and state negotiations with representatives of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee). The case also introduced a non-contact, surface-based electromagnetic conductivity survey (Geonics EM-38) to locate unmarked burials without disturbing them, and became a national policy precedent for federal actions involving Native American human remains.
5. 1988–1990 — Loiza Aldea, Puerto Rico: Joint USEPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Emergency Work Stoppage.
See Section C-6 below. Deployment of non-contact conductivity system and 3D computer transit recording to map the targeted location of an undisturbed early 600 AD Taino village (Mediania Alta L-22 & L-23), northwest coast of Puerto Rico (Grossman et al. 1990).
6. 1988–1991 — City Hall Park, New York City.
See Section E below. Federally mandated discovery, identification, and documentation of the structural remains of New York City’s first Almshouse (Grossman 1989, 1991).
7. 1989–1995 — West Point Foundry Superfund Site, Cold Spring, New York.
See Section C-8 below. USEPA Region II–mandated HAZMAT excavation of Civil War–era cannon research and development facilities (Grossman et al. 1993; Grossman 1994a, 1994b).
8. 1995–1996 — U.S. Radium Corporation, Orange, New Jersey: Confidential USEPA Region II Superfund Reconstruction.
EPA Region II (radioactivity). Confidential report reconstructing the archaeological, economic, and occupational health history of the U.S. Radium Corporation manufacturing site — source of severe radioactive contamination in northern New Jersey (Grossman et al. 1997).
9. 2001–2004 — Furnace Falls Dam, Stanhope/Netcong, New Jersey: NJDEP State-Mandated Emergency Mitigation of the Flood-Damaged Morris Canal.
See Section C-12 below. Dr. Grossman’s final government emergency project, directed under New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection mandate following catastrophic flood damage to the 1830-era Furnace Falls Dam and the Morris Canal National Historic District. Deploying historic GIS site definition (2001–2002) followed by a deep-winter 3D true-color LIDAR and Rolleimetric photogrammetry campaign (2003–2004), this project brought full circle the applied-technology approach first deployed at Raritan Landing in 1978: Ground Penetrating Radar and real-time data control, initially developed to resolve a federal EPA work stoppage, evolved over more than two decades into the historic GIS and 3D laser-radar methodologies that resolved this final New Jersey State emergency (Grossman 2002, 2004; Grossman 2008a).
U.S. Senate Office of Technology Assessment — Policy and Technology Advisor (1995)
In 1995, Dr. Grossman was recruited under a U.S. Senate initiative to serve as Special Advisor to the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), joining a small, hand-picked group of senior university archaeologists sequestered at a Virginia estate with a mandate to debate and resolve the nation’s scientific priorities for pending federal historic-preservation legislation. As the only participant not affiliated with a university, Dr. Grossman argued — at times dismissed by colleagues as “precipitous” — for two linked reforms: the requirement of real-time, on-site 3D data control during federal excavations, and the repositioning of museum conservators out of back-office laboratories and into field command-and-control roles on major federal excavation projects. Both recommendations prevailed and were adopted into the OTA’s policy guidance.
Section C — Project Summaries and Official Mandates
Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D., Principal Investigator | GeospatialArchaeology.com
International Missions
Following fourteen years of pre-Inca Andean expeditions and landmark discoveries, Joel W. Grossman conducted a series of invited international scholarly missions on behalf of U.S. and international agencies. In 1982 he served as UNESCO Visiting Scholar at Peru’s National Institute of Culture, directing a joint UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello Fund training program testing Ground Penetrating Radar at twelve Inca and colonial cities. In 1992 and 1993 he participated in U.S. Department of State People-to-People international educational and scientific training programs, leading exchange missions to the Russian Institute of Archaeology, Moscow, and presenting at a national conference in Stavropol, North Caucasus — the latter held during an unreported coup attempt.
Additional invited presentations were delivered at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest (2000), and at VU University Amsterdam as part of the four-centuries Dutch–American relations commemoration (2009).
U.S. Federal Advisory and Compliance Service
Dr. Grossman’s domestic federal service spanned the legislative, executive, and diplomatic branches of the U.S. government. In 1995 he served as Special Advisor to the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) — the sole non-academic participant in a cloistered Virginia session with senior university scholars — where he successfully advocated for on-site conservation and real-time data control as federal policy requirements. He also held appointments to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and to the Department of the Army Environmental Planning unit at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.
Between 1976 and 2004 he directed 36 federally mandated archaeological and environmental compliance programs — 18 emergency work stoppages and 18 pioneering HAZMAT Superfund investigations — nine years of which were conducted under federal security classification.
C. Federal and State Archaeological Work Stoppages and the first Superfund Investigations of Contaminated archaeological sites
35 Large scale Federal Projects- Including 18 Superfund / HAZMAT -. Federal Budget: $4,906,000.
Contaminated Superfund Hazmat Archaeological Projects (highlighted in red) — 1989–1997, No. = 18
| No. | Agency | Type | Project | Cost | End |
| 1 | EPA-EIB Region II | Work Stoppage | Raritan Landing — First EPA Work Stoppage | $250K | Dec-82 |
| 2 | NYC Landmarks Commission | Work Stoppage | Pearl Street / Dutch West India Company Block, Lower Manhattan | $300K | Dec-85 |
| 3 | EPA-EIB Region II | Work Stoppage | Little Wood Creek–Fort Edward Stage II Mitigation | $900K | Jun-87 |
| 4 | EPA-EIB Region II | Work Stoppage | Mediania Alta (L-23) & Vieques (L-22), Loiza, Puerto Rico | $500K | Nov-88 |
| 5 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Marathon Battery Company Site Stage II, Cold Spring, NY | $790K | Oct-89 |
| 6 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Marathon Battery Site Area I Stage I, Cold Spring, NY | $35K | Mar-89 |
| 7 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Marathon Battery East Foundry Cove Marine Survey, Cold Spring, NY | $212K | Nov-90 |
| 8 | EPA-EIB Region II | Work Stoppage | Ensenada Site Stage II, Rincon, Puerto Rico | $150K | Jun-90 |
| 9 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | DeRewal Chemical Company Site Stage 1A, Frenchtown, NJ | $9K | May-90 |
| 10 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Sharkey Landfill Site Stage 1A, Parsippany/Troy Hills, NJ | $7K | Feb-90 |
| 11 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Marathon Battery Stage 1BI–Kemble Property, Cold Spring, NY | $19K | Dec-91 |
| 12 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Marathon Battery Haul Road Mitigation, Orange County Historical Society | $620K | Oct-91 |
| 13 | EPA-EIB/USACE | SAMP | Hackensack Meadowlands Stage 1A & 1B, Bergen and Hudson Counties, NJ | $25K | Oct-91 |
| 14 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Glen Ridge/West Orange/Montclair Radium Dump Sites Stage 1A, NJ | $15K | Mar-91 |
| 15 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | CIBA GEIGY Toms River Basin Stage 1A, NJ | $15K | Oct-92 |
| 16 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Niagara Mohawk Stage IB, Saratoga Springs, NY | $36K | Apr-92 |
| 17 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | DeRewal Chemical Company Stage 1B, Frenchtown, NJ | $66K | Mar-92 |
| 18 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Niagara Mohawk Saratoga Springs Stage II Mitigation | $190K | Sep-93 |
| 19 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | CIBA GEIGY Toms River Basin Stage 1B, NJ | $173K | Jun-93 |
| 20 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Niagara Mohawk Stage II Workplan, Saratoga Springs, NY | $13K | Apr-93 |
| 21 | NYC Landmarks Commission | Work Stoppage | Police Service Area No. 4 Stage IB, Lower East Side, Manhattan | $18K | Jul-94 |
| 22 | EPA-EIB/USACE | SAMP | Hackensack Meadowlands Stage 1A Phase II, NJ | $40K | Jul-94 |
| 23 | East Hampton Planning | Master Plan | Culloden Point Site Work Plan Development | $7K | Jun-94 |
| 24 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Indeck Yonkers Power Transmission Line, Yonkers, NY | $35K | Mar-94 |
| 25 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Niagara Mohawk Saratoga Springs Gas Holder 2 Documentation | $19K | Jul-95 |
| 26 | EPA-EIB Region II | NEPA/106 | Horsham Sewer Interceptor Stage II, Montgomery County, PA | $27K | Jul-95 |
| 27 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | Marathon Battery Collections Transfer & Gun Platform Reconstruction | $64K | Jun-95 |
| 28 | EPA-EIB Region II | NEPA/106 | Horsham Sewer Interceptor Stage IB, Montgomery County, PA | $7K | May-95 |
| 29 | NYC Housing / LPC | Work Stoppage | Police Service Area No. 4 Stage III Mitigation, Lower East Side, Manhattan | $100K | Feb-95 |
| 30 | NY State Univ. Construction | Logistical Support | Emergency 3D Recording for Albany Waterfront Excavation | $12K | Jul-99 |
| 31 | Dept. of the Army | Applied Technology | Applied Technology Protocols — Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD | $30K | Jun-96 |
| 32 | EPA-EIB Region II | Superfund | US Radium Investigation, Orange, NJ (Confidential) | $110K | 95-96 |
| 33 | NJ DEP/HPO | Work Stoppage | Furnace Falls Dam Mitigation Plan, Stanhope/Netcong, NJ | $48K | Jun-02 |
| 34 | NJ DEP/HPO | Work Stoppage | Furnace Falls Dam Mitigation Report — Final, NJDEP | $53K | Jun-04 |
| 35 | USACE | Mitigation Plan | Contributing PA — Paleoenvironmental Model, NJ Meadowlands | $11K | Aug-06 |
Total Federal Budget: $4,906,000
(1995 = $10,765,460 in 2026 dollars)
Section C — Contents
Major National and International Archaeological Discoveries
C-1 1965 — A San Dieguito Component at Buena Vista Lake, California
C-2 1968–1971 — An Ancient Gold Worker’s Tool Kit — The Earliest Metal Technology in Peru
Supporting Primary Documents
Doc. 1 Grossman 1971a — Fulbright Interim Field Report, Andahuaylas, Peru
Doc. 2 Grossman 1971b — Fulbright Final Field Report, Andahuaylas, Peru
C-1 1965 — An Early San Dieguito Component at Buena Vista Lake, California
See Section B.2 above for full description. In 1965, at age twenty, Dr. Grossman directed the second season of the State-funded Buena Vista Lake investigation for the California Department of Parks and Recreation, uncovering an early San Dieguito component beneath twelve feet of hardpan and caliche-cemented deposits in the San Joaquin Valley — among the best-preserved examples of the San Dieguito culture in western North America (Grossman 1968; Fredrickson and Grossman 1977).
C-2 1968–1971 — An Ancient Gold Worker’s Tool Kit — The Earliest Metal Technology in Peru
See Sections B.4–B.8 above for full description. Between 1968 and 1971, Dr. Grossman completed the full arc of his Andean field training and doctoral fieldwork in the south-central Andes of Peru: excavation training under Dr. Christopher Donnan at the pre-Inca temple mound of Huaca Facho, Lambayeque Valley (Early Summer 1968); systematic field survey of the Chumbao Valley, Andahuaylas (Late Summer 1968); two seasons in residence with Dr. John H. Rowe’s UC Berkeley team in Cuzco (Summers 1968 and 1969); appointment as co-director, together with Dr. Luis (“Lucho”) Barreda Murillo of the University of Cuzco, of the joint University of Cuzco–UC Berkeley expedition to Pampachiri (1969); and the controlled stratigraphic excavation of the Muyu Moqo occupation at Waywaka, Andahuaylas (1970–1971), where he recovered the earliest known gold-worker’s tool kit in the Americas together with fifteen burials of the Early Initial Period (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 2013a).
1) In the boca (mouth) of Burial 4 — a man of approximately thirty-five years — Dr. Grossman recovered a gold-worker’s tool kit consisting of two stone anvils and hammerstones together with hammered gold foil, found in direct association with the earliest phase (Phase A) of the Muyu Moqo ceramic style he had defined stratigraphically at Waywaka.
2) Dr. Grossman’s original 1971 radiocarbon dating placed the Muyu Moqo Phase A deposits — and the associated gold foil and tool kit — at 1,500 cal BC, in the Early Initial Period. This pushed back the accepted origins of New World metallurgy by roughly 800 to 1,000 years, establishing the earliest then-known evidence of metalworking in the Americas.
3) In 2023, new high-resolution AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) radiocarbon determinations were run on the original Waywaka samples. The AMS results proved to be identical in age to Dr. Grossman’s original, relatively crude gas-proportional dating of fifty years earlier, independently confirming the 1,500 cal BC age of the Muyu Moqo Phase A gold foil and gold-worker’s tool kit (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 2021a, 2022a).
The discovery and its 2023 AMS reconfirmation were supported by Peru’s Ministry of Culture, including an invited presentation of the redating results at the Ministry-sponsored VIII Congreso Nacional de Arqueología (Grossman 2021a, 2022a).
C-2-a. See Doc. 13 — Grossman, Joel W. 1972b. “An Ancient Gold Worker’s Tool Kit — The Earliest Metal Technology in Peru.” Archaeology 25(4). The initial color announcement of the Waywaka gold discovery.
C-2-b. See Doc. 14 — Grossman, Joel W. 1983. “Demographic Change and Economic Transformation in the South-Central Highlands of Pre-Huari Peru.” Ñawpa Pacha 21: 45–126. Institute of Andean Studies, Berkeley, California.
C-2-c. See Doc. 15 — Grossman, Joel W. 2022a. “Waywaka. Los fechados AMS finales para la Fase A de Muyu Moqo. Cerámica y oro.” Actas, VIII Congreso Nacional de Arqueología. Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, Lima. The 2023 AMS redating and confirmation of the antiquity of the Muyu Moqo gold discovery, presented under the sponsorship of Peru’s Ministry of Culture.
C-3 1978–1982 — Ground Penetrating Radar to Define and Target the Deep-Winter Rescue Archaeology of a Buried Colonial Port
The 1978–1982 rescue excavation of Raritan Landing, undertaken to resolve a $100 million USEPA/Middlesex County Sewer Authority work stoppage, established the first integrated program of applied technology strategies later adapted across Dr. Grossman’s career. These included: an all-weather, deep-winter field program conducted under blast-proof, reinforced, heated 30x60-foot shelters; concurrent on-site artifact conservation; the integration of the British Harris Matrix stratigraphic recording system into a computer-compatible digital strata-designation system; the integration of on-site computer processing with U.S. Department of the Interior/National Park Service artifact typology standards; quantified, computerized on-site conservation providing real-time data control and feedback; and overhead stereo site photography. Most significantly, in place of the then-standard practice of random sampling (i.e., blind testing), Dr. Grossman deployed a first-generation, deep-penetration Ground Penetrating Radar system to produce a six-color, color-coded underground radar map of the buried deposits and structural remains — a strategy that defined a minimal-impact excavation corridor through the site ahead of construction.
This first federally mandated archaeological work stoppage — enforced under the Executive Branch’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) and funded through the U.S. EPA’s Region II Environmental Impact Branch — addressed the 18th-century port community of Raritan Landing, situated on the Piscataway floodplain on the bank of the Raritan River directly opposite Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. There, Dr. Grossman deployed a first-generation, 300 MHz deep-penetration Ground Penetrating Radar system to see through nearly four feet of deceptively sterile-appearing overburden — three feet of 1930s-era shale-rock landfill originating from construction of the Rutgers University football stadium, capped by a foot of near-surface landscaping soil and sod — that obscured the buried 18th-century port community beneath it. As the first ca. $100 million test case of federal historic preservation law and its associated Executive Branch orders, the project drew support and expertise from an unusually broad range of federal agencies, including the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, the Smithsonian Institution, the Winterthur Museum of Conservation and Decorative Art, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Department of the Army at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey (Grossman 1980; Grossman et al. 1982; Grossman 1992a, 1992b, 1992c; Holzer 1995; Grossman 2003; Grossman et al. 2019, 2020, 2021).
Raritan Landing also marked the beginning of a career-long pattern of technological firsts: on-site conservators working directly alongside excavation teams to stabilize and computer-inventory recovered artifacts, not uncommonly numbering in the 50,000 to 150,000 range; hard-wired linkages to university mainframe FORTRAN punch-card computers (1977); and, later, the first generation of on-site portable digital computers (1983). From this 1977 beginning, Dr. Grossman’s subsequent 38 high-level federal emergency and Superfund programs were consistently built around all-weather, technology-based mitigation strategies — first developed to resolve federal work stoppages triggered by archaeological discoveries under construction (1977–1989), and later adapted to the safe investigation of dangerous, highly contaminated Superfund and military ordnance cleanup sites (1989–1997).
It was this Raritan Landing precedent — and its resolution of the USEPA work stoppage through applied technology and real-time data control — that established international recognition of Dr. Grossman’s methods and led directly to his invitation to speak before the 1981 Quito conference; his 1982 invitation by UNESCO and the OAS to train Peruvian government archaeologists under the Andrés Bello Fund program; his 1992 invitation by the U.S. Department of State to train Russian archaeologists; and his subsequent invited missions to Hungary and the Netherlands. Each of these international engagements followed directly from the archaeological community’s recognition of the Raritan Landing GPR and real-time data-control program as a foundational precedent in U.S., European, and South American applied archaeology.
C-4 1986–1990 — The Emergency Rescue Excavation of a 3,000-Year Sequence of Prehistoric and Historic Archaeological Settlements on the Hudson River shoreline, in Fort Edward, Glen Falls, New York
Between 1986 and 1990, Grossman and Associates, Inc. directed a third major mitigation project — and second federally mandated work stoppage — at Fort Edward, New York, arising from the discovery of Native American burials and cultural remains. Resolving the stoppage required Dr. Grossman to help develop new federal policy addressing the cultural sensitivities of Native American descendant communities — work that necessitated a high-level series of interagency federal and state negotiations, conducted directly with representatives of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee), including Clan Mothers and War Chiefs. The culturally sensitive documentation and analysis of the site’s Late Woodland burials was undertaken throughout in direct collaboration with, and under the jurisdiction by, the spiritual leadership of the Iroquois spiritual leader, Chief Leon Shenandoah of the Six Nations. These negotiations, though never publicly reported in academic or media accounts, were undertaken with the explicit goal of resolving the dispute peacefully, informed by the memory of the 1973 confrontation at Wounded Knee.
The Fort Edward project also introduced a new applied-technology
solution to the identification of unmarked burials: a non-contact,
surface-based electromagnetic conductivity survey (Geonics EM-38), used
in place of traditional invasive subsurface testing to locate and define
burial features without disturbing them. The case became a national
policy precedent for federal actions involving Native American human
remains, establishing standards grounded in respect for ancestral
remains and for the cultural and environmental values of descendant
communities, both past and present. 
Fig. C-4.1. Composite view of the vertically stratified sequence of superimposed cultural deposits at Deep Cut A, Little Wood Creek, Fort Edward, New York, spanning approximately 35 centuries within a 9-foot stratigraphic column — from a Transitional Period basalt point (ca. 1400 B.C.) at the base to an eighteenth-century (1760 A.D.) structural feature and 1987 A.D. surface deposits at the top. A deeply buried Transitional Period hearth or roasting platform is visible at lower right (Grossman 2013). |
The evaluation of soil particle size and composition from the vertical stratified core samples spanning the full thirty-five century stratigraphic sequence at Fort Edward established the nature and origins of the buried deposits. Those recovered below the buried Transitional Period living floor were derived from the constantly shifting stream channels and flooding of Little Wood Creek, with no evidence of over-bank flooding from the Hudson River. In contrast, the sediments above that buried, three-foot-deep near surface deposits were derived from Hudson River over-bank flooding and levee formation, accumulating in vertically increasing layers of sand and silt that ultimately formed the Late Woodland Period living surface some three thousand years later. The circa 2,600-year gap between the two occupations, together with the roughly five-foot thickness of the intervening sterile deposits, provided independent geomorphological confirmation of the AMS radiocarbon chronology recovered from the site (Grossman et al. 2013).
C-5 1988–1991 — The Buried History of City Hall Park: Discovery and Documentation of N.Y.C.’s First Almshouse
A. Grossman, Joel W., et al. 1991b. The Buried History of City Hall Park: The Initial Archaeological Identification, Definition and Documentation of Well-Preserved 18th Century Deposits and the Possible Structural Remains of N.Y.C.’s First Almshouse. Draft: August 1989; Final: May 1991. Prepared for the New York City Department of General Services. Grossman and Associates, Inc., New York.
B. Grossman, Joel W., Diane Dallal, Víctor Ortiz, Argiro Agelarakas, Eugene Reyes, and Regan Vercruysse. 1988d. “Archaeological Sensitivity Evaluation and Testing Recommendations for the Proposed Subterranean Utilities Corridor between City Hall and Tweed Court House, City Hall Park, New York City.” Project No. PW-292-44. Prepared for the Department of General Services, City of New York. Grossman and Associates, Inc.
C. See Doc. 12 — Grossman, Joel W., et al. 1988–1990. “Targeted Discovery of the 1730 New York City Almshouse in City Hall Park, New York City.”
This summary of results documents the discovery and archaeological reconstruction of Manhattan’s original early 18th Century Almshouse fronting the Office of the Mayor in City Hall Park. The previously undocumented structural remains revealed key architectural elements (basement, foundation wall, and preserved, exterior living surface). The well-preserved sequence of naturally stratified, high integrity, historic colonial deposits, spanned a one-hundred-year sequence of naturally stratified and chronologically unmixed, and high-integrity, historic deposits and features, all, ranging in age between the first quarter of the 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th century (See Figure 1). The 18th century structural remains and colonial deposits were found undisturbed, buried and sealed below the modern asphalt walkway of City Hall Park, approximately midway between City Hall and the Tweed Court House by the Grossman and Associates archaeological team (See Figure 2).
The original documentary and cartographic research (Grossman et al. 1988), undertaken by the team’s historic and archival researcher, and an analyst of ceramic smoking pipe stems and bowls, Diane Dallal. Her research focused on reconstructing the land use history of City Hall Park from the 17th through the 19th centuries. This earlier study discussed the site's development from its 17th century use as "the site of a free pasture", often referred to as the Commons, to its nineteenth century use as the site of City Hall (Moscow 1979: 39). In addition to documenting the presence and time span of the original colonial Almshouse (1736), the previous study also recorded several other later 18th and 19th century structures relevant to the site of City Hall Park. These included the Upper Barracks (ca. 1757), the New Gaol (Jail) (1759), the Bridewell (ca. 1775), the New Almshouse (1796), City Hall (1812), the City Court House (1852), and finally, the Tweed Court House (1861-67).
A. Eighteenth Century Cartographic History and Targeted Geospatial Investigation:
The earliest available cartographic evidence of possible 18th century structures within the project area is the circa 1730 Bradford Map, from a survey by James Lyne. This map shows the "Common" in the present location of City Hall Park, and indicates an unidentified building, as well as a Ropewalk, in the vicinity. Neither the owner of the unidentified structure nor the owner of the Ropewalk is indicated in the literature, and deed evidence is nonexistent. A second early map, "A Plan of the City of New York in the Year 1735," by an unknown cartographer, clearly shows a structure identical to the one illustrated on the 1730 Bradford Map. This map of 1735 shows the early building bounded by a rectangular enclosure, which appears to represent the boundaries of what was "John Ell's Gardin". This structure corresponds in location to what Hall (1910) indicated was "the approximate site of the first building on the Common," and which he attributed to the "early 18th century." This enclosed parcel also appears to correspond, in part, with the location of the original 17th century grant of land to DeWitt and Tienhoven. The location of this unidentified early 18th century structure, however, appears to be well to the west and north of the remains encountered in the archaeological test excavations.
Several 18th century map depictions exist that show the location of the original Almshouse (1736-1797) and adjacent structures. These include the 1813 Grim's General Plan (depicting ca. 1742), the 1755 Maerschalck or Duyckinck Plan, the 1775 Montresor Plan (depicting 1766), the 1776 Ratzen (Ratzer) Plan and 1776 Ratzer Map (both depicting 1766-67), and the 1797 Taylor-Roberts Plan (depicting 1796) (Stokes 1967 I:270-442). It is sometimes difficult, however, to pin-point the location of historic structures based on historic map renditions, alone. Problems arise due to the surveyor's exaggeration of features to serve his intentions, the simple omission of secondary structures, inaccuracies in scaling by the surveyor or in the recent reproduction, and due to the historic widening of streets (which serve as points of reference) associated with the installation of utilities or changing modes of transportation, specifically the subway system. As a result, a structure may be located anywhere within a 50-100 foot "buffer zone" of the originally mapped and scaled location.
The 1776 Ratzer Map (based on the 1776 Ratzer Plan) was selected as the most accurate and precise cartographic evidence for attempting to establish the location of the original colonial Almshouse and associated outbuildings relative to modern surface features. According to Stokes (1967 I:341), the Ratzer Map "is one of the most beautiful, important and accurate early plans of New York." In addition to clearly showing the Almshouse and its associated gardens, this map also shows a large, unidentified secondary building in the northwest corner of the Almshouse's rear yard. This may have been any of a number of contemporary structures associated with the Almshouse, including a possible kitchen, washhouse, or hospital for contagious diseases.
The 1775 Montresor Plan is also significant because of its depiction of secondary structures in the vicinity of the Almshouse. This map shows two structures to the east and west, in the rear yard of the Almshouse. These buildings, however, are located well outside of the test excavation area. Furthermore, Stokes notes that Montresor conducted his survey in "enforced secrecy," which "probably accounts for numerous inaccuracies and omissions on the plan..." (Ibid.:340) Stokes also quotes Du Simitiere, who referred to the Montresor Plan as "extremely “uncorrect” [sic] and full of gross errors." (Ibid.). Based on these assessments, it was my choice to base my map-based targeting of the test excavation unit on the 18th Century Ratzer Plan.
B. The Stratigraphic Record:
The initial 1988 auger cores into the modern asphalt pavement of the park walkways, together with the controlled, naturally stratified excavation, identified the presence of stone foundation remains and post-occupation destruction debris of an early 18th century (post-1720) structure. The controlled test excavation identified twenty distinct natural stratigraphic deposits (contexts), lenses and features. Based on the recovered and dated artifacts and the stratigraphic relationship of these distinct layers, each context subdivision was then grouped into eleven distinct strata groups, which in turn represented four larger archaeological periods, each indicative of distinct time periods or episodes of initial development, occupation and destruction processes. The eleven strata groups (designated with Roman numerals I-XI) yielded a total of 1,643 colonial, 18th century, and 19th century artifacts, food remains and construction materials.
The excavations uncovered eleven, culturally and chronologically related episodes, designated Strata Groups I through XI (See Figure 8 and Figure 9). These eleven strata groups, in turn, represented four chronologically and stratigraphically distinct episodes of historic activity (See Table 1 and Table 4):
1) 20th Century Surface and Late 19th Century Deposits (Strata Group I and II).
2) Late 18th and Early 19th Century Post-Almshouse Fill Deposits (Strata Group III-VI)
3) 18th Century Construction, Occupation, and Destruction Remains (Strata Group VII-X)
4) Original Soil Matrix (Strata Group XI)
In addition to the mortared, dual-faced, stone foundation wall of the Almshouse, the eight-by-eight-foot excavation revealed the exterior 18th century builders' trench, designated Feature 5001, which represented one of the most chronologically-significant deposits of the City Hall Park project. The most recent datable artifacts recovered from the builders’ trench provided well-documented artifact dates which firmly established the age of the cutting and filling activities for the builders' trench, and hence, the initial date of construction of the historic foundation. Stratigraphically, the builders' trench was cut down from, and was thus contemporary with, the 18th century colonial surface beginning 18 inches below modern grade.
The diagnostic artifacts recovered from the builders' trench were consistently earlier than those recovered from any other deposits associated with the structure. These included 1 English, white, salt-glazed stoneware body fragment (1720-1805; See Plate 7), 2 English, buff-bodied, slip-trailed earthenware fragments (1 body and 1 base [1670-1795]; See Plate 8), 2 decorated, buff-bodied, tin-glazed earthenware body fragments (1600-1805; See Plate 8), and 2 German, gray, salt-glazed stoneware fragments (1700-1775). One of these was a handle fragment with cobalt decoration (See Plate 7), the other was a body fragment. Also recovered from the builders' trench were a statistically small sample of eight 4/64" pipe stem fragments, which when encountered in large numbers suggest a date range of the mid-18th century, and two undecorated 5/64" pipe stem fragments, which suggest a date range from the first half of the 18th century (See Plate 9). In addition to the general 18th century date of the pipestems, the diagnostic ceramics indicate a TPQ of post-1720 for the artifacts from the fill of the builders' trench. This date of post-1720 indicates that the builders' trench and foundation wall were built sometime after the first quarter of the 18th century, an archaeological date which is consistent with the original Almshouse construction date of 1736, indicated in published sources.
The end date for the Almshouse structure was established by the excavation of an oval, and predominantly oyster-shell-filled, refuse pit. The intrusive refuse pit cut down through the 18th century surface (Cx. 1.16) and into the structure’s archaeologically and chronologically significant builders’ trench (Feature 5001). This mundane-appearing intrusive refuse pit contained a strong sample of chronologically significant artifacts. These included a total of 5 creamware sherds; 2 undecorated base fragments, 1 decorated body fragment and 1 rim sherd (all within the 1762-1820 date range), and 1 overglazed, hand painted body fragment (1765-1810), which established the TPQ date (Terminus Pro Quem, i.e. “date after which”) for this grouping.
The dating and stratigraphic placement of the intrusive pit is significant because the date of the most recent artifact from its fill serves to help confirm the relative age of the builders' trench and the associated 18th century surface into which it cut. The diagnostic artifacts found in the refuse pit postdated 1765, while the overlying silty layer that sealed the intrusive trash pit postdated 1780. These stratigraphic relationships and artifact associations therefore document that the underlying 18th century surface, and builders' trench must have predated the intrusive cutting of the refuse pit during its occupation, and based on its dated artifacts, could be dated to sometime after 1765, consistent with the recorded time frame for the beginning and end of the 18th century Almshouse.
This archival evidence was augmented by scaled comparison of the archaeological remains to the cartographic evidence of the 18th century Ratzer Map. Initially, prior to the Grossman and Associates test excavations, it was believed that the location of the original Almshouse could have either overlapped with the foundation footprint of City Hall and thus been destroyed, or that it may have been located some 50-100 feet to the north, outside of and undisturbed by the early 19th century construction of City Hall. After completing the test excavation, and comparing the actual location of the Almshouse with its projected, map-based location, it became apparent that instead of being some 50 to 100 feet away, there was only a 30-foot difference between the projected and the archaeologically documented structure — less than the probable width of the original Almshouse, and approximately less than half its length.
C. Functionally diagnostic artifacts:
In addition to 507 oyster shells which were distinguished by their large size (36% from a single mid-18th century refuse pit), the collection included 116 clam shells, 175 fragments of diagnostic historic ceramics, 47 fragments of historic smoking pipes, two pewter buttons and bone button blanks, 121 pieces of historic glass, 8 shards of historic tile, 7 straight pins, 2 human bones, a lead "weight", and one 18th century front door key to the Almshouse. Several functionally suggestive artifactual indices were recovered in association with the building remains. These functionally diagnostic artifacts, including 18th century bone button blanks and copper alloy straight pins, provide corroborative archaeological evidence for early archival references of institutional craft activity by the indigent inhabitants of the original 18th century Almshouse.
Of the 175 chronologically diagnostic ceramic sherds recovered during the test excavation, ten diagnostic artifacts provided corroborative physical evidence of 18th century institutional craft activity by the indigent inhabitants of the original 18th century Almshouse. These included seven copper alloy straight pins and three bone button blanks, all found associated with the brick rubble fill in the interior of the colonial building. Similar bone button blanks were found at a Revolutionary War era barracks site at West Point, New York. During the revolution, American soldiers manufactured bone blanks "cut from meat bones by means of a carpenter's brace and a bit, and these blanks were covered with cloth by means of which they were sewn to the garment." (Calver and Bolton 1950:44 and 53). In addition, one bone button back with an off-set rim was found in the post-1765 oyster-shell-filled refuse pit which was stratigraphically and chronologically associated with the occupation phase of the colonial building. The presence of these artifacts is consistent with early published accounts of craft activities performed by Almshouse residents, who were mandated to work for their food and lodging during their stay.
D. The 18th century Almshouse Functions and Municipal Mandates:
When planning the construction of the original Almshouse, the Common Council considered "what manufactures will be most convenient to Employ the Poor upon: Such as carding, Knitting, Spinning, Dressing Hemp or Flax..." (MCC 1905 IV:305). In addition, the Council mandated that children sent to the Almshouse be "employed in spinning wool, Thread, Knitting, Sewing or other Labor most suitable to their Genius..." (MCC 1905 IV:307-11). This documentary evidence, combined with the archaeological evidence for institutional activity related to clothing production, suggests that the cellar, stone foundation wall, builders' trench and brick and plaster rubble of a post-1720 colonial building may indeed be that of New York City's original colonial Almshouse.
E. The Archaeological Discovery Team: 1991b City Hall Park Excavation
| Principal Investigator: | Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. (PI & PA) |
| Archaeological Field Director: | Notis Agelarakis, Ph.D. |
| Archaeological Field Crew: | Victor Ortiz; Michael Stoyka. |
| Artifact Analysis: | Lori Boros. |
| Computer Graphics: | George J. Myers, Jr. — 3D CAD reconstructions; Victor M. Ortiz — computer database and quantified 3D graphics. |
| Desktop Publishing: | Victor Ortiz. |
| Report Editor: | Vincent Melomo. |
| Archaeological Illustration: | Argie Agelarakis. |
| Archival and Cartographic Research: | Diane Dallal. |
F. Summary of Results:
The Grossman and Associates team’s stratigraphic reconstruction and chronological dating of artifacts established six major findings in support of their conclusion that their testing and cartographic investigations had indeed discovered the well-preserved 18th century remains of the first Almshouse in City Hall Park:
1) The original colonial surface lies buried and sealed, with only minimal intrusions from modern impacts, 18 inches below the most recent pavement surface of City Hall Park.
2) This buried colonial surface, and the associated 18th century building remains were found overlaid and capped by several deposits of late 18th and 19th century historic fill, possibly deriving from deep basement construction associated with the ca.1812 building of City Hall or the 1861-67 construction of the Tweed Courthouse.
3) Beneath this cap of late 18th and 19th century near-surface fill deposits, and beginning at 18 inches in depth, the excavation documented the presence of a well-preserved sequence of construction, occupation and destruction deposits and structural remains spanning from the first half through the last quarter of the 18th century (post-1720 to post-1780).
4) This sequence of construction, occupation and destruction deposits showed clear horizontal and vertical stratigraphic distinctions between the interior and exterior of the colonial building. To the south of the identified foundation wall, towards City Hall, the interior cellar hole was filled with mixed destruction debris to a depth of 4.5 feet, consisting of bricks and plaster, and artifacts derived from a broad time range, some associated in time and space with the occupation and use of the building, while others appear to have been deposited as secondary refuse during or shortly after its destruction. The area to the north of the foundation wall, on the building's exterior, was associated with the original 18th century living surface, and with historic features, including the builders' trench and a mid-18th century refuse pit, both of which cut into the original surface.
5) In addition to being deeply stratified and predominantly unmixed by later intrusions, these well-preserved 18th century deposits yielded a broad range of chronologically and culturally diagnostic artifacts of bone, metal, ceramic and glass, which were highly indicative of the economic and domestic activities of the colonial inhabitants.
6) Finally, three independent lines of evidence (archaeological, archival and cartographic) suggest that the excavated building may indeed be New York City's original colonial Almshouse: a) The location of the excavated building corresponds with the general location of the original Almshouse indicated on 18th century historic maps, b) The timeframe of the excavated building, which based on dated artifacts was built after 1720 and destroyed after 1780, corresponds with the documented occupation phase of the original Almshouse (1736-1797), and c) the recovered 18th century artifacts matched early historic archival accounts of craft activity conducted by the Almshouse's indigent inhabitants.
In sum, this well-preserved archaeological record not only augments the written historic record but also represents a sequence of tightly dated archaeological deposits, each distinguished by a high level of stratigraphic integrity, preservation, and chronological evidence — and, more broadly, robust proof that the 18th century remains discovered by the Grossman and Associates excavation and curation team, with their foundations, dateable features, human remains, and distinctive artifact types, represent the original early 18th century, New York City-mandated Almshouse in City Hall Park.
© Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. C-5-1. Google Earth perspective view of Lower Manhattan, New York showing the contemporary location and urban context of the City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. Red arrow targets the location of the early 18th century Almshouse in City Hall Park. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-2. Details of Engelbert H. Viele’s 1865 topographic map of Lower Manhattan documenting the original Native American trails (including the future Broadway) leading to 18th century historic sites and the setting of major excavation sites, which included his reconstruction of the colonial shoreline history of Lower Manhattan (Grossman et al. 1987a), his targeted discovery of the initial shoreline block of the early 17th century Dutch West India company, (Grossman et al. 1983, 1985, 1991, Grossman 2011, Grossman 2022b) by Dr. Joel W. Grossman’s team at Grossman and Associates Inc. Dr. Grossman’s targeted, map-based, discovery and 3D stratigraphic reconstruction of the original Post-1720 Almshouse structural elements, which included the front-door entrance portal cut into the Almshouse foundation wall, interior destruction debris, and the original colonial surface found 18 inches below the modern asphalt-topped walkways covering the buried Revolutionary War-era archaeological site. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-3. Full photo record of original 18th century map of Lower Manhattan by the British Officer, Bernard Ratzer in 1769, entitled “Plan of the City of New York, in North America, surveyed in the Years 1766 & 1767”. This British War map is considered the most accurate and detailed record of the topography and urban layout of the Revolutionary War-era depiction of Lower Manhattan. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-4. Detailed enlargement of the immediate City Hall Park area of the Ratzer Plan showing the continuity of the Park’s land-use patterns and continuity of the location and form of 18th century walkways within the park, features that proved critical for Dr. Grossman’s geospatial correlation between the Ratzer Plan’s detailed depictions of the Park’s architectural features relative to their continuity as documented between the Ratzer Plan and today’s surviving Park layout when the 18th century walkways and building locations are georeferenced to modern metric images as documented by this composite overlay with Google Map coverage of the park. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-5. A later monochrome lithograph of the Ratzer Plan, used to georeference the projected locations of the buried Almshouse and contemporary 18th century structures discovered by Dr. Grossman’s archaeological and archival team, intact and well-preserved, 18 inches below the “modern”, 1988-1991, surface of City Hall Park. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-6. Detailed overlay of modern, georeferenced, Google map frame of the City Hall Park, overlayed over the scaled enlargement of the original 1767 Ratzer Plan. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-7. Scaled computer CAD-based reconstruction showing the projected, versus the actual, archaeologically recorded, location of the buried 18th century Almshouse in City Hall Park. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-8. 3D computer-based CAD reconstruction of the stratigraphic interrelationships of the naturally stratified deposits of the builder’s trench, the double-sided 18th century foundation wall, the intrusive, but chronologically important, 18th century pit feature found intruding into the builders’ trench, the 18-inch-deep buried colonial surface, and interior destruction debris filling the southern half of the buried Almshouse structure. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-9. Field view looking southeast, showing location of portable shelter in the immediate vicinity of City Hall Building. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-10. Closeup field view shows location of excavation units surrounded by police barricades and protected by portable shelter. City Hall Building in background. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-11. General view of excavation unit looking south, Victor Ortiz, lead strata-control archaeologist, recording the multiple archaeological deposits found below street pavement, as well as a quarter sectioned intrusive 19th century post-hole Feat. 5006 (left); foundation post-destruction rubble fill Feat. 5004 (center). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-12. Field view showing interior rubble quarter sectioned intrusive 19th. century with intruding post hole, Feature 5006. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-13. Closeup view of the brick rubble fill, Feat. 5004, showing portions of the proximal end of a human ulna and a clam shell embedded in the rubble fill (left of center). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-14. Field view of intrusive refuse pit cutting into, and through, the buried 18th century surface and into the builder’s trench for the foundation wall. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-15. Closeup photo of the large 18th century oyster shell measuring 10 inches in length. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-16. Closeup view of mid-to-late 18th century tin-glazed buff-bodied earthenware (1600-1805). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-17. Detail photo recovered copper-alloy straight pins for sowing of clothing from the post-destruction interior rubble of the Almshouse on the south side of the foundation wall. (Noël Hume 1985: 254). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-18. Computer image-enhanced composite of Iron key as originally recovered (left), as a false-color x-Ray scan showing the preserved interior core of the 18th century key (center), and to the right, the key after being conserved (right), (from post-destruction rubble of Feat 5004, in the fill of building interior, deposited in third quarter of 18th century). © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-19. 18th century lead weight, used for commerce and measurement by indigent inhabitants of the Almshouse (Cx. 1.19 (brick rubble/fill)). Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-20. Bottom row: two pewter button blanks; Feat. 5004 (brick rubble/fill), no date; Top row: Bone button blanks after cutting the circular button from the bone. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Fig. C-5-21. 1734 lithograph of the Almshouse showing the north side entrance and stairway in the center of the north side of the building, exactly where the excavation showed the indented stonework in the building foundation wall. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. |
Appendix: Cover, Table of Contents, and Preface — Final Report to the New York City Department of General Services and the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LP-1901)
The following pages reproduce the cover, title page, list of contributors, table of contents, and preface of the final 1991b report cited above (Grossman et al. 1991b). © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Cover Page |
Title Page (Project No. PW-29244 / CP-26529 / OMO-89B2017) |
List of Contributors |
Table of Contents, p. i |
Table of Contents, p. ii |
Preface: Summary of Results, p. 1 |
Preface: Summary of Results, p. 2 |
Preface: Summary of Results, p. 3 |
C-6 1988–1990 — Geophysics and GIS for the Target-Specific Rescue Excavation of a Prehistoric Caribbean Coastal Village
Fig. C-6-0. One-page project summary: "Geophysics and GIS for the Target-Specific Rescue Excavation of a Prehistoric Caribbean Coastal Village," documenting the 1988–1990 EPA-mandated emergency excavation of the Tainó village site at Mediania Alta (L-23), Loiza, Puerto Rico. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. C-6-1. Field photo of the coastal shoreline adjacent to Loiza Aldea, Puerto Rico beachfront. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. C-6-2. Excavation unit CX423-04 at site L-23, Loiza, Puerto Rico, exposing an intact land-crab burrow (“Crabhole”) with an associated shell/cobble alignment, photographed March 31, 1988. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. C-6-3. Grossman and Associates, Inc. field staff deploying the EM-38 conductivity meter at site L-23, Loiza, Puerto Rico, to map subsurface anomalies and target buried features ahead of excavation. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. C-6-4. Detail photographic record of a dense prehistoric Taíno sherd concentration found undisturbed on its buried living surface at Loiza Aldea. Photo by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. C-6-5. Grossman and associate archaeologists clearing a wide-area exposure of a buried prehistoric living floor within an undisturbed sector of the ca. 600 AD Taíno village at Loiza Aldea (L-22/L-23). This delicate, geophysically targeted excavation revealed dense concentrations of prehistoric ceramics and other artifacts. Most significant was the exposure of a well-preserved post-mold packed with supporting stones — perhaps the earliest archaeological evidence of a prehistoric Taíno house and living floor discovered to date in Puerto Rico. © Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
Fig. C-6-6. 3D geospatial correlation plot of artifact density, tree cover, land-crab burrows, and EM-38 geophysical conductivity survey, with topographic and palm-tree overlay, of the ca. 600 AD beachfront Taíno village site at Loiza Aldea (Mediania Alta, L-23), Puerto Rico. 3D model and geophysical mapping of all natural and cultural features by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. (PI & PA), 1988.
C-7 1992–2006 — The Use of Historic GIS & 3D Terrain Modeling to Reconstruct the Archaeological Sensitivity of the Hackensack Meadowlands, New Jersey
Two publications anchor the documentary record of this fourteen-year program of federally mandated Meadowlands investigation: the 1997 U.S. Army Environmental Center study, in which Case III — “The Use of GIS and 3-D Paleo-environmental Terrain Modeling to Reconstruct Prehistoric and Historic Sensitivity and Impacts to the Now Inundated New Jersey Meadowlands” — presented the formal, federally vetted technical methodology developed across the SAMP program (Grossman 1997); and the 2003 invited paper before the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, “Revisiting the SAMP: The Use of Historic GIS and 3D Terrain Modeling to Reconstruct the New Jersey Meadowlands,” which synthesized the full multi-agency history of the applied-technology approach from its 1992 origins forward (Grossman 2003). Together, these two sources document the fourteen-year planning and direction of the Meadowlands program, from 1992 through 2006.
The project innovated through the paired use of two geospatial strategies to evaluate the archaeological sensitivity of the Hackensack Meadowlands: early GIS-based scaled comparison of historic and modern maps and air photos, and 3D paleoenvironmental modeling to project colonial and prehistoric land-use patterns over the past 3,000 years. Between 1992 and 1995, this staged series of increasingly refined parcel assessments evaluated past environmental conditions and archaeological sensitivity for 175 proposed development parcels covering 6,200 of the basin's 20,000 acres — about 30 percent of the Meadowlands District. The resulting GIS-based Historic Impact Analysis framework reduced the scope of project-wide cultural resource evaluation requirements by 80 percent, from 178 parcels recommended for additional investigation down to 35 (Grossman 1994, 1995, 1997, 2003).
The 3D terrain reconstruction drew on two independent lines of evidence. The first was a mid-19th-century bathymetric survey of mud depths across the basin, commissioned by State Geologist George Cook and surveyed by Edward Bowser, published in 1869 and digitized and georeferenced to the modern New Jersey State Plane coordinate system; once tied to real-world coordinates, these historic mud-depth records were computer-processed into 2D contour plots and 3D mesh terrain models of the basin as it appeared prior to inundation by rising sea levels. The second was a series of vertically controlled, radiocarbon-dated pollen cores, which indicated that the Hackensack Meadowlands began emerging as a salt marsh some 1,500 to 1,800 years before present, having earlier supported a hardwood forest environment of oak and alder along fresh-water streams. The resulting georeferenced terrain models defined areas of former dry land with fresh-water drainage, marshes, and plant communities once amenable to human occupation, with the ancient shoreline projected to have been some nine to twelve feet lower than present two to three thousand years ago.
In 2007, in recognition of the potential sensitivity of now-submerged wetlands and in response to potential impacts from federal marsh restoration efforts, a major U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study recommended that these geospatial and paleoenvironmental strategies — termed the “Grossman model” — continue to be implemented for current and future federally mandated cultural resource evaluations of the Meadowlands.
Fig. C-7-1. One-page project tear sheet summarizing the 1992–2007 Multi-Agency SAMP Special Area Management Plan and recent U.S. Army Corps implementations for the New Jersey Meadowlands. Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. © 2007 All Rights Reserved.
Fig. C-7-2. “Revisiting the SAMP: The Use of Historic GIS & 3D Terrain Modeling to Reconstruct the New Jersey Meadowlands.” Invited paper abstract prepared by Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. for the Meadowlands Symposium, New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, October 9–10, 2003.
Fig. C-7-3. “Map of the Marshes on Newark Bay and the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers” (Cook/Bien, 1869). The figures denote, in feet, the depth of the marsh-earth to solid bottom. [Caption pending.]
Click the map to open it full size and zoom in on the mud-depth soundings.
Fig. C-7-4. Detail of the 1869 Cook/Bien mud-depth map, showing the Cedar Swamp, Blue Mud, Snake Hill and Hudson City areas, with depth soundings in feet. [Caption pending.]
Fig. C-7-5. Digitized and computer-rendered version of the 1869 Cook/Bien map (Grossman and Associates, Inc., August 1994, Figure 5a). [Caption pending.]
Fig. C-7-6. 3D mesh model of the Meadowlands showing formerly exposed topography (green) at a sea level of minus 9 ft., 2,000–3,000 years before present. 1994 digitized Bien mud-depth data in floating grid. Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. ©2003 All Rights Reserved.
If the video does not start, click here to open it in a new window.
Fig. C-7-7. Animated 3D reconstruction of the pre-inundation prehistoric New Jersey Meadowlands, 2,000 years before present to the modern day. Joel W. Grossman, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
C-8 1989–1994 — GIS, Geophysics & Photogrammetry in the Discovery and Winter Documentation of R.P. Parrott’s Buried Civil War Cannon Proofing Facilities, West Point Foundry, Cold Spring, New York
Between 1989 and 1995, Dr. Grossman and his team were selected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers to plan and direct the first federally mandated archaeological investigation of a contaminated Superfund site — the Civil War–era cannon factory of the West Point Foundry, on the Hudson River opposite West Point. Cadmium contamination from a post-WWII battery plant built over the historic foundry required remediation both on land and in the adjoining river marshes, and cleanup could not begin until the site had been archaeologically documented under HAZMAT-certified, medically monitored conditions.
False-color air-photo analysis first revealed subsurface traces invisible on historic maps, triggering an intensive magnetometer survey on five-foot grid transects with real-time computerized mapping. Ground-truth excavation, conducted in winter under custom steel-reinforced, forced-air-insulated shelters, located R.P. Parrott’s 1863 heavy cannon testing platform and hoist-tower under 3–5 feet of cadmium-laced fill, along with 150,000 artifacts recovered and conserved on-site. Excavation of the foundry workers’ housing complex yielded museum-quality artifacts — including a microscope, calipers, an early battery and condenser, and imported coins — pointing to a more technically skilled and ethnically diverse workforce than prior accounts suggested; archival follow-up tied Parrott’s rifled-cannon design to intelligence secretly acquired through Lincoln-era military espionage (Grossman 1994b, 1994c; Holzer 1995).
A parallel marine investigation used side-scan sonar, marine magnetometer survey, and vibra-core sediment sampling to reconstruct the Civil War–era river channel and screen the riverbed for submerged ordnance ahead of dredging, identifying the buried pre–Civil War channel bottom under later sediment. Subsequent trace-element analysis of the Foundry Cove sediment core established a chronometric proxy for dating Civil War–era sediment accumulation at the site (Grossman et al. 2016). The five-year rescue program — completed on time and on budget under Superfund HAZMAT constraints — served as a national test case for the feasibility of rigorous archaeological documentation on contaminated federal sites (Grossman 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994a, 1994b).
C-9 1989–1997 — U.S. Radium Corporation, Orange, New Jersey: Confidential USEPA Region II Superfund Investigation
This entry documents a two-part, 214-page confidential federal investigation conducted under USEPA Region II mandate. The first phase (1989, under Camp Dresser & McKee) comprised a geospatial reconstruction of the subsurface location of U.S. Radium Corporation radioactive dump sites. The second phase (1995–1997, under Malcolm Pirnie, Inc.) addressed classified aspects of worker health history, workforce movement, military involvement, and the forensic history of the young female dial-painter workers employed at the site.
This report is not available for public distribution. The Principal Investigator retains an active federal security classification with respect to this investigation. No title page, table of contents, or project content is reproduced here.
C-10 1997 — Applied Technology in Archaeological Investigation — U.S. Army Environmental Center, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland
C-11 1999 — The Emergency Documentation of the Buried Colonial Port of Albany with 3D Laser Radar and Single-Camera Photogrammetry
C-12 2001–2004 — Furnace Falls Dam, Stanhope, New Jersey: Emergency Geospatial Mitigation of the Flood-Damaged Morris Canal
In 2001, Dr. Grossman was retained on an emergency basis by the Compac Corporation of Stanhope/Netcong, New Jerse. He served, under the mandate from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) following major flood damage — assessed at a 400-year flood recurrence level — to the Civil War-era Morris Canal National Monument. Phase I: Furnace Falls Mitigation Plan: Grossman 2002, “Joint Engineering and Archaeological Mitigation Plan for the Furnace Falls Pond Dam, Weir, Spillway and Channel, Stanhope/Netcong, Morris and Sussex Counties, New Jersey,” one AV file records this project’s mitigation planning phase: a 2001–2002 GIS-based audiovisual presentation documenting the historic-cartographic reconstruction work, in which pre-Civil War canal design plans and 1927 “as-built” surveys by C. C. Vermeule were digitized from the New Jersey State Archives and georeferenced against 1950s–1960s air photography to target the location of submerged and buried components of the Morris Canal system and the 1830-era Furnace Falls Dam. This work let the project avoid a proposed 300-foot bypass trench in favor of overland river diversion, completed within three months (Grossman 2002).
Furnace Falls/Morris Canal, Phase I: Historic GIS-Based Site-Definition Presentation (2001–2002). Audiovisual slideshow documenting the historic-cartographic reconstruction of the Morris Canal system and Furnace Falls Dam, using georeferenced 1950s–1960s air photography and digitized pre-Civil War canal design plans and 1927 C. C. Vermeule “as-built” surveys from the New Jersey State Archives (Grossman 2002).
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Phase II: Furnace Falls Winter Mitigation Strategy: Grossman 2004, “The Archaeology of Furnace Falls: A Mitigation Report on the Use of GIS, GPS & LIDAR for the Definition and Documentation of Furnace Falls Dam, Spillway, Weir & Channel, Stanhope/Netcong, New Jersey,” a second AV file — a high-resolution 3D true-color LIDAR animation — documents fieldwork conducted across two winter sessions, in late October 2003 and January 2004, with the LIDAR scan itself captured during the January 2004 session in sub-freezing conditions as low as -17°F. Deploying a 360° Riegl LIDAR scanner with an integrated 6-megapixel camera alongside single-camera Rolleimetric photogrammetry, GPS-controlled grid recording, and high-magnification digital video, this phase produced what is documented as the first true-color, millimeter-precision 3D LIDAR scan of an archaeological site (Grossman 2004, and Grossman 2008a, “Inter-Regional Studies: Archaeology of Toxic and Hazardous Environments,” in Pearsall, ed., Encyclopedia of Archaeology, vol. 3).
Furnace Falls Dam, Phase II: 3D True-Color LIDAR Animation (2004). High-resolution animation documenting the deep-winter site documentation fieldwork of October 2003 and January 2004, including the 360° Riegl LIDAR scan, in conjunction with the single-camera Rolleimetric photogrammetric system, captured in sub-freezing conditions as low as -17°F — the first true-color, millimeter-precision 3D LIDAR record of an archaeological site (Grossman 2004; Grossman 2008a).
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Supporting Primary Documents
Doc. 1 Grossman 1971a — Fulbright Interim Field Report, Andahuaylas, Peru
Doc. 2 Grossman 1971b — Fulbright Final Field Report, Andahuaylas, Peru
D. Invited International Scientific Missions and Exchanges (1977–2009)
The applied technologies Dr. Grossman pioneered at Raritan Landing — including all-weather fieldwork systems and real-time 3D quantified computerized data control — became the calling card for his subsequent international missions. It was Dr. Grossman's 1981 presentation of these Raritan Landing innovations before the OAS conference of national historic preservation directors in Quito, Ecuador, that led directly to his 1982 invitation to Peru, and the same body of work later drew invitations to serve as a visiting scientist in Russia (1992) and to present before the United Nations in New York (1999) — the UN presentation in turn leading to his invitation to Budapest (2000).
1. 1982 — Peru's First International Visiting Scholar under UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello. Following his invited presentation on applied technology innovations at the 1981 OAS national directors conference in Quito, Ecuador, Dr. Grossman was invited by the Director of the Peruvian Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC), Dr. Hugo Ludeña — his longtime colleague and collaborator — to serve as Peru's first International Visiting Scholar under the joint auspices and fiscal support of UNESCO, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Andrés Bello Fund, which provided direct funding to the Peruvian government in support of Dr. Grossman's program. Under a UN/UNDP Special Service Agreement (signed October 6, 1982, by UNDP Resident Representative Helio F. S. Bittencourt), Dr. Grossman served as Principal Consultant to the INC Seminar on Historical Archaeology, sponsored by UNESCO/UNDP and the OAS, held in Lima, October 4–29, 1982.
The program was designed to: (1) train senior INC archaeologists and architectural historians from Lima, Cuzco, and Ayacucho in Dr. Grossman's applied technology strategies for the investigation of complex deep-urban Inca and Colonial sites; and (2) train Peruvian government archaeologists in the hands-on testing and calibration of electronic terrestrial remote-sensing instruments — conductivity, magnetics, and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) — as well as soil chemistry methods, to evaluate the potential penetration and viability of GPR at twelve government-selected Inca and Colonial sites throughout the coast and highlands of Peru. The program was undertaken during a period of internal conflict caused by the Sendero Luminoso insurgency — a context that added logistical complexity to fieldwork in the highlands, and remains a benchmark case of applied technology in archaeology that continues to influence current applied-technology programs. Dr. Grossman's 1982 program served as the founding template for subsequent UN–OAS and bilateral international scientific assistance missions in Peru, establishing the model followed by later invited North American scientists and archaeologists.
Field tests proved that GPR could 'see' into six of the twelve test sites, producing in one instance a polychrome underground radar map that guided emergency excavation through the buried site with minimum disturbance — the same geophysical technology Dr. Grossman had first deployed during the 1977–1982 Raritan Landing, New Jersey federal work stoppage, to resolve a $100 million USEPA-mandated archaeological mitigation caused by the unexpected discovery of a buried eighteenth-century port community beneath four feet of shale overburden, in the path of a major regional infrastructure program. All Peruvian student participants performed the electronic and chemical testing themselves and were credited with co-authorship in the final 1983 UNESCO report, Dr. Grossman's invited 2019 SAA conference paper, and his 2020 article "Seeing Underground," published in Contributions to New World Archaeology (Grossman et al. 1983, 2019, 2020, 2021).
2. 1992 — Moscow, Russia: Invited Presentation, U.S.-Russian Citizen Ambassador Program and Russian Institute of Archaeology. Invited under the auspices of the 1992 Russian-USA Citizen Ambassador Program to present a major paper, Grossman, Joel W. 1992. “The Civil War Gun Makers of West Point Foundry: Archaeological Evidence for the Presence of Imported European Technology and Specialists in the Development of Heavy Ordnance,” documenting Dr. Grossman’s 1989–1995 applied technology–based excavations at the West Point Foundry Superfund site, Cold Spring, New York, before senior archaeologists of the Russian Institute of Archaeology, Moscow. Following the presentation, Russian colleagues flew the American archaeologists by helicopter to inspect major archaeological sites throughout southern Russia (Grossman 1992).
3. 1993 — Stavropol, Southern Russia: Invited Presentation, Second International Conference on Eurasian Roads. Invited by senior Russian archaeologists Dr. Grossman had trained the previous year — who had since adopted all of his applied technology systems — to present one of the first U.S. archaeological papers at a national conference in Stavropol, North Caucasus, September 15–19, 1993, held during a generally unreported coup attempt by renegade Russian army units seeking independence from central Moscow. The paper, 'Pre-Inca Highland Settlement Patterns and Environmental Adaptations in the South-Central Andes of Peru,' compared pre-Inca cultural and environmental adaptations in the Peruvian Andes to comparable Caucasus mountain environments (Grossman 1993). Following the conference, Dr. Grossman was taken to inspect excavations of ca. 1,000-year-old Khazar settlements on the open steppe.
4. 1999 — Invited Symposium Paper, United Nations Headquarters, New York City. In 1999, Dr. Grossman was invited to present an applied-technology-focused symposium paper at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, drawing on his career-long record of deploying advanced geophysical, GIS, and real-time 3D data control systems in emergency and Superfund archaeological investigations. The presentation reached an international scientific audience and proved pivotal: a Hungarian scientist in attendance brought news of the paper back to Budapest, leading directly to Dr. Grossman’s subsequent invitation as a Visiting Scholar to the Office of the Mayor of Budapest, Hungary, where his expertise in using geophysical systems to produce underground maps of buried architectural and archaeological remains was sought for its potential application to war-damaged areas of the Hungarian capital subjected to Allied WWII bombing (Grossman 1999).
5. 2000 — Budapest, Hungary: Invited Paper, First Annual Regia Civitas Conference. 'Applied Technology in the Discovery and Reanalysis of Colonial Dutch West India Company Remains in Lower Manhattan, New York.' Invited paper presented at the First Annual Regia Civitas Conference, 'Medieval Towns and Its Citizens,' Institute of Archaeology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, June 1–4, 2000 (Grossman 2000a).
6. 2009 — Amsterdam, Holland: Invited Paper, AWAD / Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations Conference. 'New Insights into Dutch Material Culture of 17th-Century New Amsterdam.' Invited paper, Session IV: Material Culture, VU University Amsterdam, October 15, 2009. Organized by AWAD / Erfgoed Nederland (Netherlands Institute for Heritage) as part of Dr. Grossman's International Visitors Program exchange, which also included scholarly meetings with specialists at the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam and Leiden, the Pijpenkabinet (National Pipe Museum), and the New Holland Foundation (Grossman 2009).
E. Major Non-Federal Archaeological and Applied Technology Projects (1976–2004)
1. 1983–1985 — Discovery, Winter Excavation and 3D Reconstructions of the Initial Shoreline Block of the 17th Century Dutch West India Company in Lower Manhattan — Howard Ronson Organization. Dr. Grossman was recruited by the Ronson Organization to plan, budget, and direct the discovery and excavation of the seventeenth-century Dutch West India Company shoreline block along Pearl Street, Lower Manhattan, culminating in a 3D reconstruction of the site.
2. 2001–2004 — Furnace Falls: Deep-Winter Mitigation of the Flood-Damaged Morris Canal — Phase I: Site Definition with Historic GIS; Phase II: High-Precision 3D Documentation with First-Generation True-Color LiDAR. Dr. Grossman directed the deep-winter mitigation of the flood-damaged Morris Canal at Furnace Falls, including 3D true-color LiDAR documentation of the dam.
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