Digging Up the Past: Lauren Cook ‘73

Lauren Cook ‘73 may not be ducking poison darts in the heart of the Amazon rainforest like the archeologists of movie fame, but his career has certainly contained its share of high adventure and unpredictability.

 

Lauren’s interest in archeology started with a book that his parents gave him for Christmas when he was seven years old. “It was put out by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and I read it until the covers fell off,” he recalls. That passion was further stoked at Fay in Mr. Upjohn’s Ancient History class, where the course provided a framework for studying the past, and centuries-old historical figures came to life. A stint at the Field School at Plimoth Plantation in high school cemented his desire to make his career as an archaeologist.

 

High adventure found Lauren early in his career. In 1987, he traveled to Iraq with a grad school professor to work on a site where the wind had worn away thirty feet of soil to reveal ancient treasures. They identified seven thousand year-old clay sickle blades, life-sized Roman bronze statues on horseback, and clay figures that ancient Sumerians placed in front of altars. With Iran and Iraq still at war, the dig was conducted under the constant threat of Scud missile attack. “After that, I felt lucky to be working in the United States, where I didn’t have to worry about people firing missiles at me!” he adds.

 

Back in the U.S., industrial archeology, the archeology of work, captured Lauren’s interest as he studied granite quarries in Quincy, Massachusetts, woolen mills in Rhode Island, and canals in New Jersey. But when it came time to find employment, Lauren found that most of the archeology in the United States is conducted under the auspices of the federal government.

 

In the mid-1990s, Lauren worked as a principal investigator on several archaeological sites unearthed by Boston’s “Big Dig” project. One site that Lauren worked on dated to the late 1600s and was identified as the home of Katherine Nanny, daughter of one of Boston’s first settlers. Ms. Nanny had achieved some public notoriety in colonial Boston when her husband ran off to New Hampshire with a servant. His wife’s only recourse was to petition the Boston Colonial Court for divorce. Among other artifacts unearthed at the site, Lauren’s team found a colonial-era bowling ball, an exciting find given that bowling was illegal in Boston at the time.

 

In recent years, disaster relief has created significant work for the archeological community. After Hurricane Sandy hit the New Jersey coastline in 2012, Lauren spent four years locating and identifying shipwrecks along the Jersey shoreline that had either been uncovered by the storm or discovered in the dredging and repair process. “I grew up on Cape Cod and had worked on a schooner. My father was involved in maritime painting and art, so it was the ideal thing for me to be doing,” Lauren recalls. Their team ended up finding 45 discrete, identifiable shipwrecks ranging from 19th-century oyster vessels to the remains of a 120-foot Menhaden Steamer wooden boat that had run ashore. While the majority of shipwrecks were returned to their watery graves, Lauren is helping the New Jersey Historic Divers Association curate the remains of one vessel for its new museum.

Lauren is currently working as an archaeologist and environmental/historic preservation (EHP) specialist for Dewberry, Inc., a nationwide engineering company. Through them, he is also a consultant to NISTAC, a program that supports FEMA public assistance projects. At present, he is deployed to Houston, Texas, where he is assisting municipalities in recovering from the catastrophic flooding.

 

Finding an old shipwreck when dredging a channel or the remnants of a colonial home under a public works project could seem like a guaranteed battle between progressive interests and preservationists. However, Lauren frequently finds himself in a position to identify the middle ground. “Archaeologists are often in a position to educate the public and resolve situations where people see themselves as having opposed viewpoints and goals. Often we find that multiple people's goals can be realized at the same time.”