The Armchair Archaeologist

No one who knows him would describe Kirk French as boring. “After Bush won the election in 2004,” he told me, “I sort of lost it. I sold everything and moved to the woods.” The “woods” consisted of sixteen acres of old farmland, and it was a twenty-minute drive from the Penn State campus, where Kirk was a graduate student at the time.

While living in his “hermit” mode, he decided to build a wooden stage in an apple tree grove not far from his cabin and organize a music festival, which he called, naturally, Kirk Fest. Jason De León, a fellow grad student at Penn State, had a band named Wilcox Hotel at the time, which played at the festival. He admired Kirk’s entrepreneurial streak and asked if he wanted to manage Wilcox Hotel. Kirk thought it sounded like fun. They ended up taking time off from their graduate studies to buy a minibus and “drive across the country and back” on tour. They also recorded two CDs during this period. I tell these stories because they emphasize that Kirk is someone who is not afraid to try something bold if it holds out the promise of making his life more interesting.

During this period as a graduate student, Kirk, who specialized in Mayan water management, was interviewed for a History Channel documentary on the Maya called Lost Worlds. As someone always seeking creative outlets for his energy, this experience helped Kirk cement a potential mission for his career: to popularize modern archaeology to a mass audience. His first efforts to explore this direction began after he graduated with his PhD and became a postdoc, and they centered on a classic 1961 documentary called Land and Water: An Ecological Study of the Teotihuacan Valley of Mexico, filmed by the late Penn State archaeologist William Sanders. This film documents how the rise of Mexico City has transformed the ecology and lifestyle in the Teotihuacan Valley. For those, like Kirk, who study historical ecology, it’s an influential film.

In the fall of 2009, Kirk got his hands on the original 16 mm reels, including outtakes that never made the original cut, as well as Sanders’s notes. He launched two projects surrounding this find. The first was to digitize the original film footage and release a DVD of the original documentary—a project he completed in the spring of 2010. The second project was more ambitious. He decided to film a new version of the documentary—an update that would show the further changes that have happened between the 1960s and the present in the valley. Kirk raised seed money from Penn State’s anthropology department and the Maya Exploration Center, put together a team, and in the winter of 2010 headed down to Mexico City to begin filming sample footage. The goal was to pull together enough compelling shots to “convince funding agencies of the importance of [the project].”

Kirk’s breakthrough for his mission, however, began in December 2009. George Milner, a professor in the office next to Kirk, called him in to join a group of archaeologists who were all standing around Milner’s phone. “You’ve got to listen to this message,” he said while dialing in to his voice mail. The recording was of a man who lived just north of Pittsburgh. He sounded articulate and thoughtful—at least, until he got to the reason he was calling the Penn State archaeology department. “I’ve got what I think is the treasure of the Knights Templar in my backyard,” he explained.

The gathered academics all had a good laugh. But then Kirk interjected: “I’m going to call him back.” His more experienced colleagues tried to talk him out of it. “He will never leave you alone,” they told him. “He will call you back every week and keep asking you questions.”

As Kirk explained to me, in an academic field like archaeology, you get a lot of these types of calls—“people who think they found a dinosaur footprint, or whatever”—and there’s just not time, with the pressure of research and teaching, to keep up with them. But Kirk saw an opportunity here that would support his mission. “This type of public outreach is exactly what we archaeologists should be doing,” he realized.

He decided he was going to follow up on the random calls that came in to the department. He planned to go meet the people, hear their stories, and help explain how the principles of archaeology can lead them to figure out whether or not a medieval organization of knights was actually traipsing around the hills of Pittsburgh. Not only would he meet them but he would also film the encounters, with the eventual goal of producing a documentary on the most interesting case. He called the project The Armchair Archaeologist. He envisioned this side project taking five or ten years—something to work on alongside his filming in the Teotihuacan Valley. “I figured, at the very least, I could show it to the students in my intro archaeology classes,” he said.

On a Sunday morning, not long after hearing the call about the Knights Templar treasure, Kirk gathered a cameraman and soundman, and headed out to Pittsburgh to investigate the claim. “He was the coolest guy,” Kirk recalls. “He had crazy ideas, but he was fun to talk to. We hung out all day, and had some beers, and chatted.” The “treasure,” it turns out, was just some old deer bones and railroad spikes found in a gravel pit, but the experience was invigorating for Kirk. It also turned out to be more consequential than he could ever have guessed.

Around this time, the Discovery Channel decided it wanted a reality show that had something to do with archaeology. As is common in the TV business, instead of developing the idea themselves, the channel instead spread word of their general interest, and left it to independent production companies to pull together specific show concepts. Three months after Kirk filmed his Pittsburgh footage, one of these production companies contacted the head of the archaeology department at Penn State, who forwarded the message to the whole staff. “Sure I had only three months of experience on my job as a lecturer at the time,” Kirk recalled, “but I was really interested in media, so I thought, ‘Why not me?’ ” Kirk followed up with the production company. “I have your show idea,” he told them, not long into their initial conversation. He sent them his Armchair Archaeologist footage.

The production company loved the idea and they loved Kirk. They refilmed his visit to the Templars’ treasure site and sent the tape to the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. The latter agreed to finance a pilot, but the former said, “Screw a pilot, let’s film eight episodes.” When they asked Kirk about a cohost, he had only one name to offer, his good friend Jason De León, who had also recently graduated Penn State and had just started as an assistant professor at Michigan. They both arranged for the Discovery Channel to buy out their teaching obligations for the following fall, and then hit the road to film the first season of what would become American Treasures.¹