Table of Contents
Part I. Early Field Training and Andean Discoveries (1961–1971) |
2 |
Preface |
2 |
A. Early Field Training in California and the American Southwest (1961–1965) |
2 |
B. Pre-Inca Field Initiation: Coastal Desert and Andean Highlands (1968–1969) |
4 |
C. Waywaka and the Origins of New World Metallurgy (1970–1971) |
7 |
Part II. National and International Archaeological Expeditions and Major United States–Mandated Programs (1968–2021) |
13 |
A. National Grants and Awards (1968–1971) |
13 |
B. National and International Expeditions and Training Missions (Peru, Hungary, Brazil, Holland, Russia) |
13 |
C. Desert and High-Altitude Andean Pre-Inca Expeditions (1968–2021) |
15 |
D. Direction of Mitigation Programs for U.S. EPA– and U.S. Army–Mandated Emergency Work Stoppages (1977–1988) |
16 |
E. Planning and Direction of Other Non-Federal U.S. Archaeological and Paleoenvironmental Programs and Discoveries |
18 |
F. Planning, Budgeting, Staffing, and Direction of HAZMAT–Superfund Archaeological Projects (1989–1997) |
20 |
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 fiscal support from 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 the coastal and desert regions of California, the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, the north coast desert of Peru, and the high-altitude south-central Andes. His principal discoveries include the earliest evidence of New World metallurgy — hammered gold foil and a gold-worker's tool kit recovered with fifteen Initial Period human burials and dated to ca. 1,500 cal B.C. (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 2013, 2022a) — and the deeply buried remains of the seventeenth-century Dutch West India Company shoreline block at Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, including the Post-1633 warehouse of the Amsterdam firm of Pieter Gabry and Sons, recovered largely intact beneath eight to twelve feet of urban landfill (Grossman et al. 1983, 1985; Grossman 2003, 2011, 2022b).
In Puerto Rico, Dr. Grossman was selected by the USEPA to plan and direct the emergency, geophysics-based targeted discovery, definition, and high-speed rescue excavation of two prehistoric Taíno sites encountered in the path of a $100 million federal work stoppage under the joint mandate of the USEPA and the USACE (Grossman et al. 1988, 1990).
Dr. Grossman's early training began while he was still a high school student in California. Drawn to archaeology by an early fascination with the subject — his parents had given him copies of Nelson Glueck's Rivers in the Desert, recounting Glueck's use of the Old Testament to discover ancient sites in the Negev desert — he was given the fragmented remains of a prehistoric human skull by a member of his parents' Quaker meeting in Sylmar, California. After repeated efforts to obtain assistance from UCLA archaeologists failed, his perseverance and frequent visits to the university's archaeology laboratory led to his admission, while still in high school, to UCLA's senior- and graduate-level Archaeological Field School, held in Cedar City, Utah, in the summer of 1961. There he trained in archaeological field logistics and the excavation of early semisubterranean Puebloan pit houses.
This early field experience led to his first professional appointment as an archaeological crew chief, supervising excavations of Pueblo pit-house and cliff-house ruins at the Philmont Scout Ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico. Then, in the summer of 1962, still a high school student, he was selected to serve as crew chief under Dr. Keith Johnson in the excavation of the Puente Rincón site (SBA-1) in Santa Barbara, California. There he supervised the excavation of a ca. 7,000 BP prehistoric occupation zone on the crest of a long ridge of prehistoric deposits leading down to the shoreline where Cabrillo had landed in 1542. It was at Puente Rincón that he deployed his first application of applied chemistry to define the limits of a buried semisubterranean pit house: by collecting soil samples across a grid on the ridge crest, measuring pH (relative acidity), and mapping the spatial variation 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. His excavation strategy combined this chemical mapping with the subtle excavation techniques learned at the UCLA Utah field school to identify soil-compaction changes marking the sidewalls of the buried pit house structure (Evans, Grossman, and Tomey 1968).
By the time he matriculated at UC Berkeley as a third-year undergraduate in anthropology and archaeology, Dr. Grossman had already accumulated four years of advanced archaeological field training and excavation experience. In the summer of 1964, Francis A. Riddell, Chief Archaeologist of the California state archaeology program, with Dr. David Fredrickson as field director, had conducted excavations of the surface midden deposits at the Buena Vista Lake site in the San Joaquin Valley of central California.
The following year, in the summer of 1965 — while still only twenty years old and an undergraduate Junior at UC Berkeley — Grossman was appointed by the State of California to co-direct, in tandem with John Waller, the deep-stratigraphic phase of the project. 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 under approximately twelve feet of cement-like caliche.
The 1965 desert 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 what proved to be 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).
In 1968, during his first year as a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, Dr. Grossman was initiated into the logistics of pre-Inca archaeology through arrangements made by his Andean professor at UC Berkeley, Dr. John H. Rowe — at that time the leading expert on Inca and pre-Inca archaeology in the United States. Rowe arranged for Grossman to serve as summer intern under the direction of Dr. Christopher Donnan, the renowned expert on the archaeology and iconography of the early pre-Inca Moche culture. Under Dr. Donnan's stewardship, Grossman was taken to the Lambayeque Valley on the northern coastal desert of Peru to record surviving murals exposed by looters from beneath the thick desert sand dunes 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 looted site, which was littered with the deep pits of plundered burials. In the back-dirt surrounding one such tomb, Grossman recovered a substantial assemblage of looter-rejected ceramic press-molds used in antiquity for the manufacture of face-neck jars — a find that represented one of the largest such caches documented in Andean archaeology to that point. He used the molds to reconstruct positive models of the original vessels 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).
After working as field assistant to Dr. Donnan on the North Coast desert throughout the early summer of 1968, where he learned the logistics and techniques of pre-Inca archaeology on the Peruvian coast, Grossman traveled to Cuzco — the base of operations for UC Berkeley Andean archaeologists — under the direction of Dr. Rowe. There he spent six weeks acclimatizing to the 11,000–13,000-foot altitude range of his upcoming field study area in the south-central highlands.
Following this period of physiological adjustment, Grossman traveled alone by air to the central Peruvian city of Ayacucho, the home of the ca. A.D. 600–1000 "Middle Horizon" capital of the Wari empire. He conducted surface collection and ceramic documentation at two major Wari urban sites: the early Middle Horizon settlement of Conchopata, and the Wari capital itself. In doing so, he identified a small but important sample of brightly decorated ceramics belonging to a previously unrecorded earliest phase of the Wari style.
Upon his return to Berkeley, and with continued Ford Foundation and National Science Foundation support, Grossman spent a semester in the collections laboratory of UC Berkeley's Lowie Museum reconstructing the sample under the supervision of his Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Dorothy Menzel — the university's leading expert in Middle Horizon Wari culture, iconography, and chronology — and with the assistance of the museum's ceramic specialist and Director of Collections, Larry Dawson. Menzel designated the new ceramic complex Phase 1A of the Chakipampa style, dating to ca. A.D. 600. Grossman's resulting graduate paper on the find was submitted with high marks for Anthropology 220C under his lead professor, Dr. John H. Rowe (Grossman 1968).
In 1969, supported by Ford Foundation and National Science Foundation grants administered through Berkeley's Institute of Andean Studies, Dr. Rowe and his University of Cuzco colleague Dr. Oscar Núñez del Prado — a leading Andean archaeologist and ethnohistorian who had joined Rowe in their 1954 joint expedition to the little-studied region of Apurímac (Rowe 1956) — launched a follow-up expedition into the heartland of Apurímac to locate and record reported mummy-bundle remains. The expedition was undertaken as a joint University of Cuzco–University of California, Berkeley endeavor, co-directed by Joel W. Grossman of UC Berkeley and his Peruvian counterpart Dr. Luis ("Lucho") Barreda Murillo of the University of Cuzco.
The team was given three mandates: (1) to record new archaeological sites; (2) to conduct surface collection in search of new pre-Inca ceramic styles; and (3) to photographically and graphically document any surviving elements of the reported brightly colored polychrome mummy bundle. Such textile-wrapped bundles, commonly well-preserved in the arid coastal desert sands, were rarely encountered in the Andean highlands.
The expedition was highly productive. The joint UC Berkeley–University of Cuzco team traveled to Pampachiri over mountain passes above 13,000 feet. From the air, the town appears in the shape of a puma — much like the ground plan of Inca Cuzco — as first noted by Rowe (1967) (Figure 1). The team successfully documented and photographed surviving fragments of the sought-after mummy bundle textiles, which had been protected and stored in the town's high school. All surviving textile elements were recorded and photographed. From one fragment, Dr. Grossman obtained a radiocarbon date of A.D. 1228 cal (UCLA 1497A).
Local Pampachiri guides aided the team at every turn, helping to locate the textiles and guiding the search for ceramic surface collections and architectural documentation at two important, well-preserved pre-Inca settlements on either side of the river separating the Departments of Apurímac and Ayacucho. The townspeople also openly shared their oral histories about the two abandoned settlements and provided knowledgeable village guides to aid in recording the prehistoric and colonial sites.
With the aid of these local guides, the team made substantial surface collections of pre-Inca pottery from two well-preserved settlements known by the Quechua names Chichaqasa (Ap2-19) and Ch'naqota (Ay 5-2) (Grossman 1971). These abandoned settlements, composed of clusters of circular dry-laid cobble dwellings and llama pens, also yielded twelve finely made prismatic blades of basalt and chalcedony (Figure 2), whose workmanship suggested sophisticated lithic-manufacturing techniques. Grossman interpreted the knapped-stone tools as having been used to harvest grains such as quinoa and maize, with the sharp-edged blades likely inlaid into U-shaped wooden sickles or scythes of the type illustrated by the early seventeenth-century chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala in his account of Inca daily life and religion ([1615] 2001).
Of special note was the gracious reception the Berkeley–Cuzco team received from the Quechua residents of Pampachiri. The townspeople welcomed the team with two memorable events. First, they hosted the archaeologists at a feast of roasted piglet and a diverse polychrome array of indigenous Andean potatoes and local greens (Figure 3). Second, as a sign of their pleasure at the team's arrival, they staged a rarely recorded Andean spectacle: a confrontation between a bull (symbolizing the Spaniards) and a captured condor (symbolizing the indigenous peoples), strapped to the bull's back with wooden spikes punctured into the bull's hide and secured with leather cords (Figure 4).
The event is known by two names: among Peru's mestizo population, the Spanish–Quechua composite Yawar Fiesta ("Blood Festival," from the Quechua yawar, blood); in older indigenous Quechua tradition, Turupukllay ("Game of the Bull," or "Bull's Play"). Dating back to the eighteenth century, the contest carries clear symbolic content: the indigenous Andean people typically release the surviving condor — whose escape signals good tidings for the coming year — while the bull is slaughtered by the townspeople.
The team's Pampachiri hosts explained that they captured the condor by using putrid (fermented) meat, which rendered the giant bird — often with a wingspan reaching ten feet — punch-drunk and easily seized by two male villagers (Figure 5). As visible in one of Dr. Grossman's photographs of the event, the condor's captor held a whip in case it became necessary to control the bird during its attachment to the bull (Figure 6). This unique Quechua confrontation between bull and condor was subsequently observed by the archaeologist Monica Barnes twelve years later, in 1980–1981, and published — without images of the event — in 1994 (Barnes 1994: 13–18).
The following year, Dr. Grossman was funded as a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Fellow and by a one-per-university UC Berkeley Special Career Fellowship. Although the combined awards totaled only $8,000 in 1970 dollars (equivalent to approximately $68,085 in 2026 dollars), this multi-grant support made it possible for Grossman, as a Ph.D. candidate, to undertake a year-long (1970–1971) controlled archaeological excavation in a region that some U.S. colleagues had dismissively described as an "Andean cultural backwater" (Grossman 1971).
With the guidance of his UC Berkeley doctoral supervisor, Dr. John H. Rowe, who cautioned him against selecting a site with extensive surface architecture often associated with deep intrusive disturbances from later foundation construction, Grossman instead chose an undisturbed hilltop at 11,000 feet overlooking the colonial valley city of Andahuaylas. The site, known locally as Waywaka and designated Ap2-2, had originally been recorded by Rowe and Núñez del Prado in their 1954–1955 survey of the region (Rowe 1956) (Figure 7).
Grossman's excavation strategy was clearly defined in the pre-fieldwork project plans submitted to his advisors at Berkeley and to the Fulbright Commission. His objectives were: (1) to document the layer-cake, dateable pre-Inca chronology of the site's superimposed sequence of stratified cultural deposits; and (2) to reconstruct any changes in settlement size over time. To meet these goals, he laid out a line of one-by-two-meter stratigraphic units across the crest of the site.
The line of units across the crest revealed a naturally stratified, two-meter-deep sequence of culturally distinct pre-Inca deposits spanning approximately 3,500 years. The crest units yielded the earliest pottery in the southern Andes, fifteen tightly flexed Early Initial Period human burials, blue stone beads and Pacific Ocean marine shells (indicating long-distance trade), evidence of textile arts in the form of circular spindle whorls, and — at the base of the sequence — the earliest evidence of New World metallurgy: hammered gold foil and a gold-worker's tool kit, dated to ca. 1,500 cal B.C. (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 2013, 2021, 2022a).
These early Muyu Moqo deposits, however, were recovered only in a 20- to 30-meter-wide zone at the very crest of the site. The remainder of the pre-Inca deposits across the hilltop were composed almost exclusively of later Qasawirka-style ceramics, which formed a thin 30-cm layer at the crest overlying the early Muyu Moqo deposits but reached a depth of more than one and a half meters down to sterile bedrock along the edges of the site. Together, these lateral changes in stratigraphy suggested an order-of-magnitude increase in settlement size — to several acres — following the initial ca. 1,500 cal B.C. Muyu Moqo occupation.
The archaeological significance of Waywaka lies in the convergence of two major lines of evidence: an early ceramic tradition and the earliest currently documented gold-working assemblage in South America. Located near Andahuaylas in Apurímac, Peru, midway between Ayacucho and Cuzco, the site preserves a long and well-stratified sequence offering an unusual opportunity to examine technological innovation in the south-central highlands during the Initial Period. The materials recovered from the lowest deposits — Muyu Moqo ceramics, hammered gold foil, blue stone beads, and a discrete gold-worker's tool kit — provide critical evidence for evaluating the chronology, regional context, and technological implications of early Andean metallurgy.
Excavations conducted in 1970 by Dr. Grossman at Waywaka revealed a deeply stratified sequence of pre-Inca cultural deposits spanning more than 3,500 years. The lowest deposits yielded evidence of early Initial Period pottery production in the Muyu Moqo style — named after the site itself (Ap2-10; PAA76) — together with gold foil and a gold-worker's tool kit (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 2013, 2021, 2022a). Based on clear vertical stratigraphic breaks, Grossman divided the Muyu Moqo sequence into three phases (A, B, and C–D), represented within nearly two meters of pre-Inca deposits. The antiquity and integrity of this stratigraphic sequence make Waywaka a key site for understanding early technological developments in the south-central Andes.
The Muyu Moqo ceramic style is characterized by distinct stylistic changes through time. Although no clear regional parallels have yet been identified for the earliest Phase A pottery, it is marked primarily by neckless olla forms, thin vessel walls, flattened rims, and a thin, watery purplish-brown slip applied over the body of the sherds. This assemblage appears to represent the earliest Initial Period pottery currently identified in the south-central highlands. Phase B is distinguished by the introduction of smoothed, rounded lip forms and burnishing on the rim and upper body. Phase C–D shows the first appearance of horizontal nicked ridges on the shoulders of neckless ollas and jar forms consistently decorated with appliqué fillets. Unlike the earlier phases, Phase C–D also exhibits strong technical and decorative parallels with other late Initial Period traditions from both coastal and highland sites, including Huaca Prieta (Junius Bird, pers. comm. 1971), Marcavalle, Las Haldas, early Pikicallepata, and the Machalilla occupation in Ecuador (Grossman 1983: 52–58). Spouted bottle forms also changed appreciably across all phases.
Above the deeply buried Muyu Moqo deposits, overlying layers of more recent cultural material provided additional key insights into the pre-Inca chronology of Andahuaylas. The uppermost stratum — a mixed surface plow-zone — yielded heavily fragmented, ill-defined late pottery. Beneath this surface cap lay the Qasawirka occupation: a near-surface, hard-packed adobe-melt horizon approximately 25 cm thick that yielded distinctive finely burnished red-slipped sherds, originally designated by Rowe as the Qasawirka style after a valley-bottom site of that name in the Andahuaylas basin (Rowe 1956).
In each excavation unit, the Qasawirka style was found exclusively within this compacted adobe-melt horizon — presumably the residue of eroded mud-brick walls associated with the level. Several units exposed double-faced stone foundation walls in the same alignment and orientation, indicating rectilinear domestic structures atop the crest of Waywaka (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983) (Figure 8). The Qasawirka layer also revealed a well-made oval cobble-lined mountain-top cistern for the collection of rainwater for domestic use, along with a series of east–west-aligned double-faced stone walls throughout the upper levels of the site (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 2019, 2022a). Six recent high-resolution AMS radiocarbon determinations from the Keck Carbon Cycle AMS Facility at UC Irvine now fix the age of this ceramic style as a 200-year occupation period, dating between A.D. 685 and 887 cal (Grossman, in press).
The initial discovery of gold in the lowest deposits at Waywaka (Figure 9) consisted of a relatively large piece of hammered gold foil approximately 4 cm in length, bent in half, crushed into a tube-like form, and inserted through the perforation of a large blue stone bead. Both objects were recovered from the mouth of Burial No. 4, the burial of an approximately 35-year-old male (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983). Following this discovery, the midden in the lower levels of the adjacent stratigraphic test unit was systematically water-screened through fine window-screen mesh (Figure 10). This procedure resulted in the recovery of nearly four dozen (n = 53) flakes of gold foil and 58 blue stone beads, substantially strengthening the evidence for early gold use at the site.
In the deepest layers, the excavation also revealed fifteen tightly flexed human burials, evidence of early pottery production, and — adjacent to another burial — two stone bowls containing a finely carved stone anvil and three hammer stones, constituting a gold-worker's tool kit. This find pushed the origins of New World metallurgy back in time by nearly a thousand years. The original radiocarbon dating provided a widely debated age of approximately 3,500 years before present, or 1,500 B.C. (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983).
Grossman's discovery of the earliest evidence of New World metallurgy was not initially accepted by several Andean archaeologists, who in succession published opinions — none based on new evidence — critiquing his work and asserting that the dating of New World gold-working was exaggerated and could be no earlier than 1,000 B.C. (Shimada 1994; Bray 1998–1999; Aldenderfer 2008). Five subsequent high-resolution AMS radiocarbon determinations, compiled as a weighted average by the Director of Beta Analytic, Ron Hatfield, proved Dr. Grossman's original 1972 dating correct: the weighted average of the five most recent AMS measurements yielded 1,500 cal B.C. — the same age presented in his original Archaeology magazine announcement of the discovery.
The discovery of the gold-worker's tool kit was fortuitous, occurring on one of the final days of excavation during a thunderstorm (Grossman 1972a: plate LXXIII, figs. 203–204; plate LXXIV, figs. 205–209; plate LXXV, fig. 210; 1972b: 274–275). It initially appeared as two large, non-diagnostic oval cobbles stacked on sterile bedrock and seemingly unrelated to any of the fifteen Muyu Moqo human burials identified at the site (Grossman 1983: fig. 4) (Figure 11). When the upper stone was removed (Figure 12), the assemblage was revealed to consist of two oval, pumice-like cheqo bowls — not ceramic bowls, as one author later and erroneously reported (Lechtman 2014: 370). Once the upper inverted "cobble" had been lifted, it became clear that it was in fact a thick stone bowl. Inside were four finely ground stone tools: a carefully formed and polished mushroom-shaped stone anvil measuring 10.1 cm in length; three smaller cylindrical hammer stones ranging in weight from 58.5 to 102 grams; and gold foil (Grossman 1972b: 275; 2013, 2021). This associated and undisturbed assemblage of gold-working tools remains the only find of its kind reported to date from Peru and, more broadly, from South America.
Given the unassailable evidence of the new high-resolution AMS determinations, in 2021 Roberto Lleras, former Director of the Gold Museum of Colombia (Museo del Oro) in Bogotá, took a strong stand in support of Dr. Grossman's discoveries and invited him to present his most current high-resolution dating evidence before a high-profile international venue: Lleras' symposium on Andean Metallurgy at Peru's VIII National Congress of Archaeology, hosted by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture in Lima, August 16–22, 2021. Dr. Grossman's symposium paper was presented remotely before Dr. Lleras' South American metallurgy symposium and on Lima-based Channel 24 television, and was subsequently published in Spanish in the 2022 Congress Proceedings (Grossman 2022a).
This high-profile, Peruvian government–sponsored venue provided a strong international rebuttal to nearly fifty years of negative commentary contesting the Initial Period antiquity of metallurgy in general, and of gold-working in particular, in pre-Inca Peru. The five new AMS determinations confirmed beyond reasonable doubt the 1,500 cal B.C. age of Grossman's original discovery and dating for the origins of New World metallurgy (Grossman 1972a, 1972b, 1983, 2013, 2021, 2022a).
(1970 dollars: $8,500; 2026 dollars: approximately $72,955)
1. 1968–1969 — National Science Foundation (NSF) and Ford Foundation.
2. 1970–1971 — Ph.D. Awards: U.S. Department of State Fulbright Fellow; UC Berkeley Special Career Fellow.
1. 1981 – OAS, Quito, Ecuador. Invited to speak on advanced technology in the archaeological investigation of complex deep-urban contexts before the Organization of American States (OAS), addressing an international conference of Latin American directors of archaeology and historic preservation agencies (held during the Peru–Ecuador border conflict).
2. 1982 – UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello–Funded Mission to Peru. Following his 1981 OAS conference presentation in Quito, Dr. Grossman was invited by the Director of the Peruvian Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC) to lead a joint UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello Fund program testing terrestrial remote-sensing methods (conductivity, magnetics, and ground-penetrating radar) and soil chemistry at twelve Pre-Inca and Inca sites. He trained INC archaeologists and architectural historians in the testing and calibration of electronic instruments used to measure the depth-of-penetration capabilities of Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) at twelve government-selected Inca and Colonial cities throughout the coast and highlands of Peru.
The UNESCO–OAS initiative, undertaken during a period of internal conflict in Peru caused by the Sendero Luminoso insurgency, remains a benchmark case of applied technology in archaeology and continues to influence current applied-technology programs. Under Dr. Grossman's UNESCO–OAS-funded mission, Peruvian national-government archaeologists and architectural historians in Lima, Cuzco, and Ayacucho received training in advanced technological systems and strategies for the investigation of complex deep-urban Inca and Colonial sites. They also received hands-on training in the use and calibration of electronic systems for measuring GPR depth-of-penetration capability at twelve government-selected Inca and Colonial cities — a geophysical technology Dr. Grossman had first deployed in 1978 to resolve a $100 million USEPA-mandated archaeological mitigation and work stoppage 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. The 1978 GPR survey produced a polychrome underground radar map that guided emergency excavation through the buried site with minimum disturbance.
3. 1991–1992 – Russian Institute of Archaeology and Hungarian Ministry of Culture. Invited by the Russian Institute of Archaeology and by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture to deliver papers on the Pearl Street excavation and on applied geophysical and 3D mapping technologies. The 1992 paper, delivered in Moscow before the Russian Institute of Archaeology, was titled "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." The bilateral exchanges with Russian counterparts and senior project directors enabled the transfer of applied-technology solutions Dr. Grossman had developed in the United States and the Caribbean to (a) resolve costly federal work stoppages caused by unexpected archaeological discoveries after funding and construction had begun, and (b) plan and direct the first EPA- and USACE-mandated and funded Superfund HAZMAT teams in the eastern United States, providing the federal government with protocols and applied-technology solutions for the safe and remote documentation of contaminated archaeological sites.
In addition, Dr. Grossman's Russian hosts requested that he review and advise their project directors on applied-technology strategies, with a focus on GIS and geophysical solutions (GPR, magnetics, and non-contact conductivity systems) to provide targeted excavation strategies for large-scale circular cut-stone Scythian tombs and well-preserved wooden Viking settlements throughout the Caucasus of southern Russia (Grossman 1993).
4. 1994 – Brazilian Foreign Ministry, Smithsonian, and U.S. Department of State, Brazil. Invited by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, the Smithsonian Institution, and the U.S. Department of State to teach four high-altitude geospatial and remote-sensing courses on the use of remote sensing in Amazonian archaeology and historic preservation at the University of Brasília, Brazil.
5. 1995 – U.S. Senate Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). Invited Dr. Grossman to take part in a high-level policy-development retreat to prioritize U.S. Congressional legislative initiatives and policy mandates for archaeology and historic preservation across federal regulatory agencies.
6. 2009 – The Netherlands Ministry of Culture, Amsterdam. Invited to participate in the Henry Hudson 400th Anniversary commemoration in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where Dr. Grossman presented updated dating evidence for the Broad Financial Center / Pearl Street Dutch West India Company deposits.
1. 1968 – Documentation of North Coast Desert Temple Murals and a Looted Tomb. Introduced to Pre-Inca Andean fieldwork through an invitation to serve as field assistant and trainee under Dr. Christopher Donnan of UCLA, one of North America's leading experts in Moche archaeology. Field investigations at the Late Intermediate period site of Huaca Facho in the Lambayeque Valley of the North Coast focused on the recording of inset polychrome murals on a temple façade. Survey of the site revealed a grave lot of discarded ceramic face molds surrounding a looted tomb, leading to Dr. Grossman's first publication in Andean archaeology, on the technology and indigenous craftsmanship of pre-Inca mold-made ceramic face-neck jars (Grossman 1969).
2. 1969 – Recording of a Rare Pre-Inca Textile-Wrapped Mummy Bundle. Following his initial North Coast Pre-Inca field training in the Lambayeque Valley, in the summer of 1969 Dr. Grossman, then a Ph.D. candidate, was appointed by his supervisor at UC Berkeley, Dr. John H. Rowe, Director of the Institute of Andean Studies, to co-direct a joint U.S. (UC Berkeley) and Peruvian (University of Cuzco) expedition to the remote Andean settlement of Pampachiri, Andahuaylas, on the border with Ayacucho, in search of a Pre-Inca mummy bundle of brightly colored textiles. Dr. Grossman and Dr. Luis Barreda Murillo, the Peruvian Co-Director from the University of Cuzco, led a team that included four Cuzco archaeologists and a driver. Although mostly destroyed, the surviving elements of the mummy bundle — held at the local Pampachiri school — were recorded and dated. The town honored the team's arrival with a traditional feast of roast pig and a rare Corrida de Cóndor, a little-known and sparsely recorded contest in which a condor, pegged with spikes across a bull's back, is pitted against the bull.
3. 1970–1971 – Solo High-Altitude Expedition into the South-Central Highlands of Pre-Inca Peru. Conducted as a Fulbright–Special Career Fellow under the auspices of the Institute of Andean Studies, UC Berkeley, between 1969 and 1971. The expedition discovered a 35-century sequence of Pre-Inca cultures, fifteen Early Initial Period human burials, and the earliest evidence of New World metallurgy, which included — in one of the burials — locally hammered gold foil and a goldworker's tool kit of hammers, an anvil, and two stone bowls, dated to 1500 cal B.C. (Grossman 1972a–b, 1983, 2003, 2008a–b; Grossman et al. 2020, 2022a).
4. 1981 – OAS Conference, Quito, Ecuador. Invited to address the Organization of American States' international conference of Latin American directors of archaeology and historic preservation agencies.
5. 1982 – UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello–Funded Mission as Peru's UNESCO Visiting Scientist for the Peruvian Ministry of Culture and the Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC). Following his OAS conference presentation in Quito the previous year, Dr. Grossman was invited in 1982 by the Director of the Peruvian Instituto Nacional de Arqueología (INC) to lead a joint UNESCO–OAS–Andrés Bello Fund program testing terrestrial remote-sensing methods (conductivity, magnetics, and ground-penetrating radar) and soil chemistry at twelve Pre-Inca and Inca sites. He trained INC archaeologists and architectural historians in the testing and calibration of electronic instruments used to measure the depth-of-penetration capabilities of Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) at twelve government-selected Inca and Colonial cities throughout the coast and highlands of Peru.
6. 2021 – Lima, Peru: Andean Metallurgy Symposium, VIII National Congress of Archaeology of Peru. Invited by Dr. Roberto Lleras, former Director of the Gold Museum of Colombia (Museo del Oro), to present a remote keynote on the corrected 1,500 cal B.C. AMS dating of the Waywaka gold-working evidence before the Andean Metallurgy Symposium of Peru's VIII National Congress of Archaeology, hosted by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, August 16–22, 2021 (broadcast on Lima Channel 24; subsequently published in Spanish in the 2022 Congress Proceedings, Grossman 2022a).
Twelve years of federal service as an independent civilian contractor to the USEPA, the USACE, and other federal and state agencies, mandated to enforce Executive Orders on Historic Preservation.
1. 1977–1981 – Raritan Landing: A Buried Colonial Port. $100 million federal work stoppage under NEPA and the Federal Superfund Program; Rutgers University RASO Mitigation Project. Implemented the first strategic deployment of Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) to produce a color-coded underground map of a buried Revolutionary War–era port community — a guiding capability that enabled a minimalist excavation strategy to document the cultural resource quickly and to restart ongoing construction (Grossman 1980a; Grossman et al. 1982, 2020).
2. 1983–1985 – Lower Manhattan Dutch West India Company Excavation, Pearl Street, New York City. Selected through a nationwide search by the Howard Ronson Organization to serve as Principal Investigator and Principal Author of the deep-urban, deep-winter discovery and excavation of the seventeenth-century Dutch West India Company shoreline block on Pearl Street, Lower Manhattan. The excavation recovered the deeply buried, intact, Post-1633 warehouse of the Amsterdam firm of Pieter Gabry and Sons, the residence of New Amsterdam's first doctor, and the home of the Dutch West India Company Secretary, beneath eight to twelve feet of urban landfill. On-site, real-time, computerized artifact identification, inventory, conservation, and dating laboratory facilities — staffed by conservators — documented the recovery of 43,314 Dutch, British, and Native American artifacts during the three-month excavation, rather than long after the field season. Exotic early Dutch artifacts included a pre-occupation Dutch token (rekenpenning) dated to 1590 and the front-door key of the warehouse, both recovered from the cracks of its cobble floor. The recovery of small charred and dated seeds enabled Dr. Grossman to reconstruct robust ethnobotanical evidence documenting a 70% decline in plant-species diversity throughout the seventeenth century (Grossman et al. 1983a, 1985; Grossman 2003, 2011, 2022b).
3. 1988–1991 – Discovery of New York's Post-1820 Almshouse in City Hall Park, New York City. Used georeferenced eighteenth-century historic maps to target, excavate, and document the front door, front-door key, front wall, and builders' trench of the post-1820 Almshouse, together with tightly dated diagnostic artifacts confirming the recorded work assignments of indigent residents: button blanks of bone and pewter, sewing straight pins, buttons, and a measuring weight (Grossman et al. 1988, 1991).
1. 1976–1978 – Statewide Archaeological Evaluation for Proposed New Dam Construction Programs throughout New Jersey. NJDEP Division of Dam Safety – Raritan River, Passaic, and Monmouth drainages; Rutgers Archaeological Survey Office (RASO), Rutgers University (Grossman 1977).
2. 1983–1985 – Private Sector (Howard Ronson Organization): Deep-Urban, Deep-Winter Planning, Discovery, Excavation, and 3D Reconstruction of the Deeply Buried Seventeenth-Century Dutch West India Company Shoreline Block under Lower Manhattan. Howard Ronson Organization (HRO); NYC Landmarks Commission. Dr. Grossman served as Principal Investigator and Principal Author (Grossman et al. 1983, 1985; Grossman 2003, 2011, 2022b).
3. 1991–1995 – Multi-Agency USACE, NOAA, USEPA, NJDEP, and NJ Meadowlands Commission Special Area Management Plan (SAMP) Study. Hackensack Meadowlands Archaeological and Historical Sensitivity and Impact Evaluation, vols. I–II. Prepared for Camp Dresser & McKee (CDM) by Grossman and Associates, Inc., New York (see Grossman 2003).
The multi-staged SAMP historic/cultural study was undertaken in three steps: (1) GIS-based scaled comparisons of historic maps to define areas of potential archaeological sensitivity, both historic and prehistoric; (2) the use of what Dr. Grossman has termed Historic Impact Analysis — the scaled subtraction of all impacts to a study area, used to refine and focus recommendations for additional archaeological assessment to only those areas with limited or no demonstrable past disturbance; and (3) the application of 3D terrain modeling and paleoenvironmental reconstruction using georeferenced historic Civil War–era military bathymetry, dated pollen cores, and marine transgression curves to graphically project the changing landforms and habitat of the Hackensack Meadowlands over the past 3,000 years.
4. 1989–1990 – Lead Consultant, UeNYSe (Unearthing New York System Elevator). A robotic interactive installation conceived by the NYC developer The Kaufman Organization, Inc., for New York City's only museum dedicated to the education and demonstration of major discoveries in New York urban archaeology. Produced by SMA Video, the UeNYSe South Street Seaport–managed museum installation was developed by a diverse media-production team of scriptwriters, model builders, software developers, robotics engineers, and high-tech media specialists, with Dr. Grossman serving as the project's lead archaeological consultant throughout its year-long planning, design, and construction phases. The central theme of the interactive installation was a 3D interactive multimedia reconstruction — featuring scaled models and a large studio set — of Dr. Grossman's deep-urban winter excavation of the initial shoreline block of the Dutch West India Company settlement on Pearl Street, Lower Manhattan.
In 1989, Dr. Grossman was retained as the project's lead historical and archaeological consultant, charged with ensuring the accuracy of the proposed interactive multimedia robotic reconstruction of his early Dutch West India Company (WIC) excavation. Mr. Melvyn Kaufman directed Dr. Grossman to meet him, his architects, and his corporate construction staff at the Kaufman Organization's midtown Manhattan corporate headquarters, in his top-floor executive office.
Mr. Kaufman opened the meeting by looking Dr. Grossman squarely in the eye and, before speaking, waving a worn copy of the colorful children's book Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge. His mandate was clear: "I do not want some dry academic piece, but instead something to give children a sense of the romance and excitement of the discovery." Dr. Grossman thought for a moment and quietly responded, "Yes, I can do that — but on one condition: that the project be not only a static educational museum outlet, but also include a working state-of-the-art conservation laboratory for the processing and conservation of both Dr. Grossman's collection of computer-inventoried, chemically stabilized 43,314 Dutch, British, and Native American artifacts, as well as other collections — all to be housed in a functioning, computerized wet-dry archaeological laboratory facility with proper safety and exhaust equipment installed."
Mr. Kaufman agreed, and from that moment Dr. Grossman spent weeks lecturing the production team in his office and being picked up by stretch limousine by the lead producers to guide the set design and construction process. The final installation augmented the interactive multimedia museum by offering visitors a working glassed-in wet-dry conservation laboratory, providing close-up views of ongoing artifact stabilization and reconstruction. Throughout its ten-year tenure, the museum facility in the Kaufman Building at 17 State Street provided 10,000 children and adults with a lifelike "feel" for the process of discovery that Dr. Grossman had used on Pearl Street to uncover the deeply buried Dutch settlement.
5. 1992 – West Point Foundry, New York: Civil War Cannon R&D Program and Federal Intelligence Reconstruction. Initiation of long-term planning, excavation, and historic reconstruction of the Civil War–era West Point Foundry cannon research-and-development program, leading to the subsequent identification of previously unknown Executive Branch intelligence and espionage capabilities under President Lincoln's administration (Grossman et al. 1991a, 1992a, 1993, 2019; Grossman 1994a, 1994b, 2003).
In this capacity, Dr. Grossman's mandate was to guarantee that the Executive Branch and its regulatory agencies — USEPA, USACE, and the U.S. Army — would prevail in environmental conflicts and to facilitate the successful and effective implementation of Executive Orders to the highest Department of the Interior scientific standards and guidelines. This mandate required the deployment of high-definition, real-time applied-technology solutions adapted from space, military, private-sector, and intelligence sources, providing supervising agencies with advanced applied-technology-based tactical archaeological and mitigation solutions. These included real-time, 3D data control in the discovery, definition, and on-site artifact conservation of emergency or contaminated contexts — executed in real time, in deep winter, with daily feedback for all 3D-mapped, quantified, and data-controlled archaeological discoveries requiring Executive Branch and supervisory-agency policy and fiscal decision-making.
1. 1989–1995 – West Point Foundry, New York: First U.S. Government–Mandated and Funded HAZMAT Archaeological Team. EPA Region II — the first EPA-mandated HAZMAT archaeological mitigation of a U.S. Superfund site (cadmium). Dr. Grossman's team discovered the testing facilities of a secret Civil War–era cannon research and development program, and, together with in-depth investigations in the National Archives, reconstructed previously unknown Executive Branch international intelligence and espionage capabilities under President Lincoln's administration (Grossman et al. 1991a, 1992a, 1993, 2019; Grossman 1994a, 1994b, 2003).
2. 1991 – U.S. Radium Dumps, USEPA–Region II. EPA-mandated historic geospatial land-use and archaeological reconstruction of the distribution and location of World War I–era U.S. Radium dumps in Montclair and Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Planned and directed the geospatial reconstruction of early twentieth-century radium dumps (georeferencing historic nineteenth-century maps to satellite imagery) from the U.S. Radium Corporation throughout the Montclair and Glen Ridge study areas of central New Jersey (Grossman et al. 1991d).
3. 1991 – HAZMAT Archaeological Investigation of the Drewel Company Superfund Site, Hunterdon County, New Jersey. EPA Region II (arsenic).
4. 1993 – Geophysical and GIS-Based Subsurface Targeting and Excavation of Buried Civil War–Era Gas Holders at Saratoga Springs, New York. USEPA–Region II Superfund mitigation based on the deployment of historic-GIS map targeting integrated with magnetometer-based subsurface 3D survey and mapping of the initially ill-defined locations of highly toxic, coal-tar-contaminated metal 1860s-era gas-holder tanks and coal gasification works at the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation site, Saratoga Springs, Saratoga County, New York (Grossman et al. 1993) (toxic coal tars).
5. 1993 – HAZMAT Archaeological Investigation of the Ciba-Geigy Toms River Superfund Site, EPA Region II (heavy-metal contamination) (Grossman et al. 1993).
6. 1993–1995 – HAZMAT Excavation of Civil War–Era Heavy Cannon R&D, Workers' Housing, and a Buried Prehistoric Site within the West Point Foundry Superfund Site, Cold Spring, New York. USEPA–Region II (cadmium) (Grossman et al. 1993; Grossman 1994a, 1994b).
7. 1996–1997 – U.S. Radium Corporation: Confidential Reconstruction of Archaeological Sensitivity, Economic History, and Worker Health History. EPA Region II (radioactivity) (Grossman et al. 1997).
8. 2001 – Stanhope/Netcong, New Jersey: NJDEP OHP. Developed, budgeted, and staffed a historic-GIS-based National Register–eligible sensitivity evaluation and archaeological mitigation strategy for the flood-damaged, Civil War–era, National Register–eligible 1830 historic dam and spillway elements of the Morris Canal (true-color terrestrial LiDAR and single-camera Rolleimetric 3D photogrammetry). Prepared for the Compac Corp. and the NJ Office of Historic Preservation. These systems were deployed to facilitate deep-winter mitigation and 3D recording of the flood-damaged Morris Canal under sub-freezing conditions. The planning and GIS targeting (tying historic maps to satellite imagery) of a buried Civil War foundry integrated with the historic Morris Canal National Monument proved both challenging and dangerous and resulted in serious weather-related injuries to Dr. Grossman in –10° to –20°F sub-freezing conditions (Grossman 2002, 2003, 2008a).
9. 2004 – Stanhope/Netcong, New Jersey: Deep-Winter Archaeological Mitigation and Documentation of Flood-Damaged Civil War–Era Elements of the Historic Morris Canal. Deployed a new single-camera Rolleimetric photogrammetry system and the first generation of true-color 3D LiDAR to produce a high-resolution, georeferenced, three-dimensional record of an endangered and dangerous frozen historic site under sub-freezing conditions of –10° to –20°F (Grossman 2004, 2008a).