Student Research and Field Work Opportunities

In the last several years, I have organized several multidisciplinary research projects in Southern Utah, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the Santa Barbara Historic Presidio, the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Plantation, and Valencia, Southern Spain (see below). Most of my teaching and research is strongly interdisciplinary. In my role as teacher and coordinator of several diverse research projects, I have gained a great appreciation for the "team approach" to scholarship. Each project directly involved several students, and they often complete independent research projects based on this research. My students and I are using equipment and computer hardware and software that, to my knowledge, only one other university utilizes in their archaeology department. I am proud to say that our work in these diverse locations has become internationally recognized as a model for the use of cutting-edge technologies in archaeology and geophysics. In fact, I was recently asked by the editors of American Antiquity to write a special feature article about the sophisticated methods that my students and I are using in the study of history and prehistory (see publication Larson and Ambos 1997). In his editor's comments, Mark Aldenderfer wrote that our work may revolutionize the way archaeological research is conducted in the future. Indeed, our research program has been the focus of several BBC broadcasts and, here at home, we appeared on President Maxson's "Beach View" TV series. We have been invited by a number of institutions and government agencies to assist in their archaeological programs. I am confident that in the future our approach will be the model for future applications of cesium vapor magnetometer and gradiometer research in archaeology. My students and I will expand our research area to include Japan, and perhaps Australia, this summer. I provide my students (approximately 25 students) with a very unique educational opportunity, and they in return provide me with an incentive to reach much higher as a teacher and scholar. If my efforts and those of my students propel archaeology to become more scientific, then I will have met my highest personal expectation.