American Treasures

I first encountered Kirk French while watching the Discovery Channel. During a commercial break, I saw an ad for the network’s newest show. It was called American Treasures. The spot showed a pair of young archaeologists, dressed in jeans and battered work shirts, driving around the American backcountry in an old Ford F-150, helping people determine the historical significance of their family heirlooms. The hosts, who were revealed to be archaeologists Kirk French and Jason De León, seemed loud and energetic and enjoying the hell out of what they were doing. It was like Antiques Roadshow, but with considerably more drinking and cursing. I set my DVR to record the premiere.

Early in this first episode, Kirk and Jason find themselves in the East Texas flatlands, at a run-down, dirt-road homestead. They are there to investigate the authenticity of a suit of clothes that supposedly belonged to Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame.

It takes the archaeologists all of thirty seconds to disprove this claim: Not a lot of suits from that period feature a “Made in China” tag. But this doesn’t dampen their enthusiasm.

“You’re from a moonshine family,” notes French.

“Yep,” drawls Leslie, the suit’s owner.

“Let’s try some moonshine.”

Soon a glass pitcher is produced. As Leslie pours the hootch into Mason jars, he offers a warning: “Don’t ask about the proof. You wouldn’t drink it if you knew.” As Kirk and Jason sit on a pair of logs, drinking the moonshine and swapping stories, surrounded by East Texas nothingness, they seem to be having a great time.

I was hooked. To understand the appeal of American Treasures, you must understand its competition. At the time, cable TV was overrun with “cash for junk”–style shows, such as the History Channel’s Pawn Stars, which follows the staff of a Las Vegas pawnshop as they try to bargain cash-strapped people out of valuable possessions; and the Discovery Channel’s Auction Kings, which follows the adventures of an Atlanta-based auction house whose website deploys significantly more exclamation points than, say, Sotheby’s might approve of. These shows, of course, are not to be confused with Discovery’s American Pickers, which also follows a team that buys people’s possessions, but now features the key twist that the bargain hunters travel in a van instead of working out of a storefront. And none of these should be confused with either Discovery’s Auction Hunters or the History Channel’s Storage Wars, both of which take a hard-hitting look at buying abandoned storage units at auction—a topic too nuanced, it seems, to be fully plumbed by only a single series.

These programs never interested me. But something about American Treasures caught my attention. I think once I looked past the name—which Kirk later admitted to me he both hated and fought against—I was struck by the fact that the hosts had a purpose beyond just wanting to be on television. For one thing, they aren’t full-time TV personalities, but are instead academic archaeologists. (The Discovery Channel had to buy out a semester of their teaching obligations so they could film the first season.) In addition, there’s no exchanging of cash in this show (a mainstay of all other entries in this genre). Putting monetary value on artifacts is antithetical to the mission of archaeology, and Kirk and Jason refused to do so in their show. The hosts instead seem driven by the idea that they’re educating the public about the reality of modern archaeology. This is their mission, and as indicated by the smiles on their faces as they sipped East Texas moonshine in the premiere episode of their show, it’s a mission that’s a hell of a lot of fun to pursue.

Not long after meeting Pardis Sabeti, around the time I started questioning why I didn’t have a mission-driven career, Kirk and Jason popped back to mind. I realized that they provided a perfect case study of what it’s like to leap a large gap between idea and practice. The mission of popularizing archaeology to a mass audience, and having a fun time doing so, sounds good on paper, but to actually devote your career to this mission, especially when you’re just out of graduate school and trying to make a name for yourself in a traditional academic field, is a terrifying prospect. I called up Kirk to find out what strategy he used to make this leap with confidence.