An Interview with John Doershuk, State Archaeologist of Iowa (Part 1)
As Maria Pearson’s story makes clear, the State Archaeologist was in the position, in the 1970s, to decide that the human remains of indigenous Iowans could be boxed up and shipped to a laboratory, while those of Euro-Americans would be treated with respect and re-interred according to their religious traditions. With the passage of Iowa’s Burials Protection Act of 1976, things changed. I recently sat down with John Doershuk to discuss these changes.
PR: What does a State Archaeologist do?
JD: It varies state to state. In Iowa, we have the relatively unique situation in which the Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) is a state of Iowa department separate from what is typically called in most states the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO, pronounced “Shippo”). In many states, they are combined. In Iowa, the OSA was established prior to the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), so it was an existing entity specifically positioned at the University of Iowa as a research center. Once the NHPA was enacted in 1966, then the review and compliance part of it was assigned to the SHPO, which is housed in Des Moines as part of the State Historical Society of Iowa. So in Iowa we have separation of these offices where in many other states there is not, and that allows the OSA to act as a research center and do a lot of things that those in other states are prevented from because in those states they [archaeologists] are the regulators of the law. We, on the other hand, are free to pursue grants and contracts that allow us to do research, and the majority of the 24 people on the staff here is involved in grant and contract funded research. We provide expert consulting, science research.
The Archives of the Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa.
We also have an education program through which we try to connect with the people of the state, and we maintain the official site file for the state of Iowa, which contains the location of all known archaeological sites that are recorded with the Office. Finally, we are the state archaeological repository. We have four million items from 14, 000 archaeological sites here in the state.
PR: I’ve always imagined that a state archaeologist is like a county corner. He or she is on call, waiting for the phone to ring and someone on the other end of the line says, “We’re building a highway and one of our bulldozers just dug up a skeleton.”
JD: That was very much what it was like in 1965, prior to NHPA . . . But now, the Department of Transportation has us on retainer to go out ahead of construction and [become] part of the planning process—before right of way is purchased, before any dirt is moved. They are way out ahead, looking at the landscape, trying to determine whether or not there is something of cultural importance in their path.
PR: This is why you keep files, so that you have a sense already that a particular area might be a sensitive one to excavate or build on.
JD: Yes, the idea is to try to evaluate when there is still time to make a decision about avoidance, or preserving in place, or mitigation.
PR: How you choose between leaving objects in “place” or excavating them to preserve them and perhaps make them available here at the OSA for education and research?
JD: Well, a lot of that is actually driven by forces outside of our control. If an applicant for a construction permit is trying to lay some pipe, for example, and they have a preferred route, they might for engineering reasons say, “its too expensive for us to redesign and move the pipeline, we would prefer to go ahead and impact the site.” They will then go ahead with paying for a full archaeological excavation and tribal consultation. Or, it might be a great site we’d like to excavate, but they say, “No, we’ll change our route.” In that case, we preserve it in place. We note where it is and keep it in our records here so that if we need to avoid impact at a later time, we can.
PR: You said you came to the OSA in 1995, so this means your career has been especially impacted by NAGPRA. You are probably part of the first generation of anthropologists who came of age in the era of repatriation.
JD: Yes, I was in grad school at the time [of NAGPRA’s passage] and it was very much on our minds as new PhDs going out into either the academic workforce or the consulting workforce, asking ourselves, “what was this going to mean?” I remember vividly one professor a year or two before NAGPRA was passed, who was just an absolute doomsayer, you know, “this is the absolute end of archaeology.” But then there were also others who very much saw it as an opportunity. The majority of the young professors coming into our grad program were embracing NAGPRA, saying “it’s going to happen, we need to make the best of this.”
PR: How did it make you a different kind of anthropologist, coming up with NAGPRA as your ethical and legal touchstone?
JD: Well, some programs embraced it earlier than others, some have resisted, and there are still pockets out there that pretend it doesn’t exist. But I very much benefitted from having some mentors who were more forward looking, and so throughout my career, I have sort of gravitated to situations like this one at the Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa. You know Iowa passed the first in the nation law protecting ancient human remains. I’m very proud of that, and I’ve continued to move in that direction.
Generally speaking, growing up in this era meant that we had to be more anthropological, and not hide in the world of archaeology, which is a field where you might hear someone say, “We deal with dead people, we deal with the past, we don’t have to talk to anybody if we don’t want to.”
Native American tribal leaders, non-native farmers and ranchers from across the United States march down Independence Avenue while demonstrating against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline in 2014. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
There was also the idea that we were curators of the past, and that was a slippery slope toward “we own the past.” Too many archaeologists and some physical anthropologists have slid down that slope to thinking, “these are our people, we own these things and they are important to us—more than anyone else.
NAGPRA was definitely part of a reaction of Native Americans saying, “wait a minute, these are our people, let’s at least sit down and talk about it.”
To be continued . . .
John Doershuk has been with the Office of the State Archaeologist since 1995. In 2007, he became the State Archaeologist 
